Before the pandemic, roughly 70,000 students rode 800 buses to public school buildings in Orange County, Fla.
But as of the first few weeks of this school year, the number of students riding the bus has dropped to 53,000 riding 500 buses.
What’s to blame for such a sharp drop in ridership and buses on the road? “It’s not because we’ve gotten more inefficient,” said Bill Wen, the Orange County school district’s senior director of transportation services.
It’s also not because the number of students eligible for legally mandated transportation to and from school has changed. That figure has hovered around 90,000 students for the last several years.
The culprit, in Orange County and across America, is a shortage of drivers for those buses. Four years after the pandemic scrambled the country’s labor market and threw school systems into unprecedented chaos, many districts are still struggling to fill open bus driver positions.
That means longer wait times for students to get to and from school, fewer options for families with limited time and resources, and bigger headaches for administrators allocating resources and puzzling out routes. There’s even some evidence that bus driver shortages contribute to chronic absenteeism, which soared during the pandemic and has yet to retreat to pre-pandemic levels.
The Columbus schools in Ohio earlier this month were down nearly a quarter of the 610 drivers needed for the start of the school year. The Paradise Valley school district just outside Phoenix has only 52 of the 110 drivers it needs to cover 40 schools. And the statewide school system in Hawaii recently suspended dozens of routes due to a lack of available drivers and promised reimbursement for families who drive students to and from some schools.
Districts in Colorado, Kansas, Michigan, South Dakota, Vermont, and Virginia have recently reported bus driver shortages as well.
Pandemic-era shortages are sticking around
HopSkipDrive, a private company that offers paid rideshare services to students in districts nationwide, recently surveyed 400 district leaders and school transportation workers, including bus drivers and mechanics, from across the country. More than 90 percent of them said their district has a shortage of bus drivers that is “severely” or “somewhat” constraining their operations.
Sixty percent of school leaders said they’ve had to cut routes this year because of shortages. Forty-five percent have bumped up pay or expanded benefits for drivers. And more than 1 in 4 school leaders told HopSkipDrive they’ve hired contractors to supplement bus service they can’t provide on their own.
In Orange County, Wen has watched as the average age of his bus driver team has crept upward to nearly 60 since the pandemic began. Most of the remaining drivers retired from another profession, and many relocated recently from northern states in search of warmer weather.
But the area, which includes Orlando, is rife with industries that can offer higher salaries for similar skills: theme parks, hotels and resorts, local transit authorities, motor coaches, and massive corporations like Amazon.
Plus, in Florida and elsewhere, driving a school bus can be grueling and thankless. The schedule is disjointed, with hours in the early morning and late afternoon and a long break in the middle.
“It’s a different lifestyle,” said Wen, who also serves as executive director of the Florida Pupil Transportation Association. “Some people just aren’t attuned to it.”
Districts have had to make creative and sometimes unpopular adjustments to fit operations within the constraints of their transportation staffing.
Buses in Orange County now make two trips to each school building every morning and afternoon, with the same driver transporting two busloads of students. That means some staffers have to arrive at work earlier to greet students when they arrive or leave work later to wait for the last ones to leave.
Administrators have encouraged parents who have the means to drop off their kids at school and urged students who can drive themselves to do so, freeing up more seats on buses for students who have no other option. But the increase in car traffic has led to backups that make everyone later and more frustrated.
“It’s not ideal, this current situation,” Wen said. “But it’s what we have until we’re able to figure out that magic wand for everyone to get enough drivers.”
Districts are searching for solutions and hoping more candidates emerge
Staff shortages at schools are rarely uniform across the nation’s 50 states, 13,000 public school districts, and 100,000 school buildings.
This upcoming school year is the first one since the pandemic began with no shortage of drivers in Baltimore County, Md., said Ron Prettyman, who owns Whitcraft Services, a private school bus contractor that serves the county’s schools.
“We’re probably turning away applicants at this point, which is a little scary, because usually when a lot of people start applying to drive a bus, in my experience there’s usually a downturn in the economy,” he said.
Prettyman has made a point when talking to candidates of highlighting the positive experience that driving a school bus can be. He started driving one of his company’s buses himself when staffing got particularly tight when schools reopened in the fall of 2020.
“Now I’m able to talk from experience to an applicant. I’m not just saying, ‘It’s a great job,’ but I’m saying, ‘Hey, I do that every day. It’s an actually enjoyable part of my day.’”
Still, that sentiment doesn’t ring true for everyone. Roughly 30 miles east of Prettyman’s district, higher wages haven’t eliminated the driver shortage in Harford County, Md., said Steve Nelson, owner of Nelson Bus Company, the Harford County contractor. This year, his company is three drivers short for the 24 buses it supplies to the local schools.
The biggest challenge for his drivers is “the deterioration of the student discipline,” said Nelson, who also serves as president of the Maryland School Bus Contractors Association. “People just don’t want to deal with the kids.”
States have made some policy changes in recent years to help address shortages: making required physical examinations for bus driver licenses less frequent, allowing retired bus drivers to serve as substitutes in high-need areas, and giving permission for school board members to volunteer to fill in.
In Orange County, Wen’s team has invested in a digital system that equips every student with an ID card and allows the district to store information about every student who swipes in and rides a bus. That tool will help ensure that the district submits precise counts of student ridership to the state, which uses ridership numbers to determine transportation funding.
Meanwhile, the district has extra money left over from its current allocation of transportation funding because some of the positions it was meant to fund haven’t been filled. Wen and his team are using those funds to offer a suite of incentives: $2,000 signing bonuses for new hires, plus extra bonuses for drivers who show up to work every day, drivers who don’t incur any traffic violations or have other preventable accidents while on the job, and drivers who take on extra work to fill in for others who are out.
All told, drivers can rack up $11,000 in bonuses—for now. Wen isn’t sure what he’ll do about those incentives if the shortage abates.
“As we get closer to being full, we’ll have to look at, how do we fund the incentives?” he said.
