After solving this logistical jigsaw puzzle, depending on coverage needs, she sets out for her morning pickups.
#School bus driver salary 2020 drivers#
When there aren’t enough drivers to cover all eighty-four routes - a daily occurrence - she must divide uncovered routes among the remaining staff. She rises at 3:30 AM each morning and arrives to work at 4:45 AM to make the route assignments. The trouble is this devotion is not rewarded with adequate pay and benefits.Īs a driver-dispatcher, Jacqueline Smith must meet arduous administrative challenges. A lot of drivers, you would hear them say, ‘Those are my children!’”
Illustrating the concept of “bleeding yellow,” he told Jacobin, “Your ride is what sets their mood as they arrive at school. Joey Griffin has been driving school buses in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, for over twenty years. They see something maybe this child is not receiving.
some children, not knowing whether the school meal is gonna be the only meal that they’re receiving. You’d be surprised how many kids I’ve had to counsel, keeping them on the right track. You don’t know what that child has experienced the night before. We’re the first and the last to see the children. Jacqueline Smith described the human service side of her job: Drivers must be prepared to handle medical emergencies, de-escalate student conflicts, and problem-solve in situations where children do not have a safe place to be dropped off. School transportation also entails a number of critical and often stressful human service components. Riley Wilson, who drives school buses for Des Moines Public Schools in Iowa, told Jacobin that because his role requires him to handle different routes each day, he has to “do a lot of on-the-spot navigation and course-correcting in an area completely unfamiliar with in order to get to the next stop without falling behind the route’s scheduled timing.” Wilson continued, “It’s incredibly stressful to be making all of those mental calculations while also dealing with managing the physical size of the bus on the road and the students onboard.” ‘Where is the consideration for bus drivers transporting these parents’ precious cargo?. Like long-haul trucking, school bus driving requires a high-stakes mix of alertness, navigational skill, and mechanical knowledge. School bus drivers need to quickly gain the trust of unfamiliar kids and project the kind of authority that can compel young passengers back to their seats with a word uttered from forty feet away. While teachers may, understandably, struggle to maintain order in classrooms of twenty-five students, school bus drivers are expected to observe up to seventy-two rowdy children with a mirror and manage their behavior while driving a fifteen-ton vehicle along a complex route. It’s that pay and benefits are grossly incommensurate with the incredibly challenging, multifaceted work that school transportation entails.ĭriving a school bus is a hard job. Why are US school systems plagued by chronic bus driver shortages? The reason isn’t that there’s a lack of jobseekers willing in theory to work as school bus drivers. Jacqueline Smith, a driver-dispatcher for Indian River County School District in Florida and vice president of transportation for her union local, told Jacobin that staffing shortages were causing her and her colleagues to do “double work” long before the pandemic.Īccording to annual survey data from School Bus Fleet magazine, more than half of US school districts have experienced driver shortages every year since at least 2006, and more than 70 percent of districts have experienced shortages for most of those years. In September, Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker activated the National Guard to drive kids to school in communities hard hit by COVID-19.īut while school bus driver shortages are more pronounced than in years past, they’re hardly new. In a nationwide survey of those in the pupil transportation industry conducted in August, 78 percent of respondents said their district’s bus driver shortages are getting worse, with 51 percent describing the situation as “severe” or “desperate.”Īs a result, students are facing hours-long commutes, and parents are interrupting their work days to wait in lengthy pickup lines where busing is either unavailable or severely delayed. The 2021–22 school year has been marked by severe transportation problems across US school districts. Having the resources to do the job effectively is another. They call it “bleeding yellow.”īut ask any nurse or teacher, and they’ll tell you the same thing as many yellow-blooded school bus drivers: Caring is one thing. There’s a term school bus drivers use for the calling many feel to provide kids with protective supervision, comfort, and cheerful encouragement on their daily commutes.
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