Schools in Fort Wayne, Ind., finished the academic year this spring with a rotation of virtual learning days after persistent bus driver shortages caused delays in getting students to and from school.
The virtual learning, Superintendent Mark Daniel told local media, was a stopgap measure to maximize learning time while the district worked on hiring more drivers.
To that end, the district is offering $5,000 sign-on bonuses and other incentives and recently hosted an event where prospective drivers could test-drive a school bus and meet with transportation department leaders.
Fort Wayne is one of many school districts eyeing the summer as a critical time to bulk up their bus driver ranks and ease perennial driver-recruitment challenges that have forced some to reduce bus service, change bell schedules, and rely on educators to take time from their core job duties to help with transportation.
The Pasco school district in Washington state this month said it’s considering changes to start and end times to ease yearslong bus driver shortages. A similar situation is unfolding in Corpus Christi, Texas, where district leaders are considering schedule changes at some schools to manage driver shortages.
The Winston-Salem/Forsyth County school system in North Carolina recently sent a message to families asking them to consider driving their kids to school because it doesn’t have enough drivers.
About 26 million students ride school buses daily on the nearly 500,000 buses operated by U.S. schools or the transportation companies they hire. Staffing shortages are not new but have intensified since the COVID-19 pandemic, when many retirees and older adults who drove buses quit because of health concerns and when competition for drivers from higher-paying delivery services ramped up.
Educators are taking time away from their jobs to help with transportation
When they lack drivers, schools often rely on other staff members to fill the gaps.
Nearly 1 in 5 respondents to a recent EdWeek Research Center survey (19%) said they take time away from their core job duties daily to help with school transportation, like managing car lines at drop-off or driving school buses or vans.
Another 17% of educators said they do so a few times a year, while 6% each reported taking on such responsibilities monthly or weekly. Forty-one percent of educators said they never take time away from their jobs to help with transportation.
Educators in higher-poverty schools were more likely to report helping out with transportation duties daily (22%) than those in lower-poverty schools (12%). Separately, elementary school educators (38%) were more likely than middle (9%) and high school (7%) educators to take on the additional transportation-related responsibilities every day. (Higher-poverty schools were defined as those where a majority of students qualify for free or reduced-price meals.)
The nationally representative survey included responses from 116 district leaders, 41 school leaders, and 596 teachers. It was administered online March 25-May 5.
Kevin Pitts, the deputy superintendent of China Spring Independent school district in Texas, has been driving morning and afternoon bus routes for five years, he told local media recently. The district also offers a sign-on bonus or stipend to staff members who are certified to drive a school bus. Some employees have become certified in recent years to make extra money temporarily but continue to drive longer-term, district leaders say.
Chris Mills, the superintendent of the Thief River Falls school district in northwest Minnesota, relies heavily on retirees to run bus routes. The part-time gig lends itself to more flexible schedules.
In addition, some local businesses have worked with the district to ensure their employees can drive buses if they’re interested in doing so. Still, the district two years ago had to switch to what it calls a “two-mile rule,” meaning only students who live more than two miles from their school are eligible for bus service. Previously, the district had a one-mile rule.
The change helped Thief River Falls reduce the number of routes and the number of drivers it needed, Mills said. But there was a tradeoff for the small, rural district in a state where students can choose to open-enroll in another district.
“The other impact is that we lose some kids because some rural districts around us are willing to pick up and transport those kids to their districts, so we lose some to open enrollment,” Mills said. “I wouldn’t say it was a big loss, but it certainly impacted us, and we want to get back to that one-mile rule.”
‘We are really struggling to keep bus drivers’
In open-ended responses to the EdWeek Research Center survey, respondents lamented “extreme” and “chronic” bus driver shortages, and many said the drivers they do have must drive multiple routes to pick up the slack.
Several said students are often late to class because of the driver insufficiency.
“We are really struggling to keep bus drivers,” one person wrote. “The student-walker radius has increased again this year, and we have more car riders than ever before. If one driver is sick, another driver has to take two routes instead of one, causing students to get to school late and to get home late. This is a regular occurrence.”
Another educator said driver shortages have affected their school’s ability to take kids on field trips—which district leaders in some places have said they’re also reducing due to high fuel prices. Another person pointed out that unreliable transportation can mean students don’t have the chance to participate in before- or after-school tutoring and extracurricular activities.
In recent years, some states have loosened restrictions on who can drive buses to help districts offset shortages. Alabama lawmakers this year, for example, passed a measure that allows some retirees to return to work as school bus drivers while still collecting retirement benefits. State Superintendent Eric Mackey said the policy could help because some retirees already have the proper certifications to drive buses.
