No answer yet for school bus driver shortage

Both public and Catholic boards short 18 drivers, 1,300 students impacted

School board officials are still trying to find a solution to the bus driver shortage causing late student pickups and drop-offs unseen in decades.

Catholic board chair Pat Daly said the delays are the worst he’s seen in his 30 plus years as a trustee.

Public Board chair Todd White said the Hamilton-Wentworth Student Transportation Services held a special meeting on Tuesday to try to come up with new strategies to overcome a problem that just won’t go away this year.

“At this point, we have to think outside the box,” said White.

The transportation body is a joint consortium of the public and Catholic boards. It deals with busing contracts and issues and is cochaired by White and Daly.

“We are still 18 drivers short between us and the Catholic board,” White said on Wednesday.

“It hasn’t changed much since the start of school.”

While the contracted bus companies have newly trained drivers coming on, an equal number of experienced drivers have quit, leaving the problem unresolved for the foreseeable future, said White.

“It has been one step forward, one step backwards. It’s very troubling for us.”

White said the boards used the same strategies this year as last year to resolve the same problem by mid-October.

But the same strategies this year have “barely made a dent,” he said.

The new strategies being explored range from adding another new bus company — Hamilton already has four contracted — to offering financial incentives to former or retired drivers to return to the job, he said.

White said 1,300 students from both boards continue to be affected — 700 from the public board.

The average bus delay has been 17 minutes, so some take longer than that.

While White would not call it a local crisis, he called it a provincial one because it’s an ongoing concern in other boards as well. Daly said, “Everyone is doing everything they can” to solve the problem, but any new strategies are limited.

The education ministry has recently announced it is re-examining its school transportation funding model and the process it compels the boards to use in hiring school bus companies, he added.

The process for hiring the companies “has created a great deal of instability for the boards and the (bus) operators,” said Daly.

White said the boards look to provincial associations like the Ontario Public School Boards Association to make the education ministry aware of the urgency to get this fixed.

Association spokesperson May Moore said it has been long advocating for an increase and review of transportation funding. The province was supposed to start a 12 to 18month consultation with the public about it, she added.

The Hamilton transportation consortium will meet again in early November to consider more options on solving the issue, said public board spokesperson Shawn McKillop.