School bus woes linger for thousands of students across GTA
Driver shortage not expected to be resolved before Christmas
Three months into the school year, a busdriver shortage that caused bedlam in September and left children late or stranded across the GTA is still affecting as many as 5,000 students, Ministry of Education statistics show.
And while the situation is improving, the shortage is not expected to be resolved by the Christmas break, Toronto District School Board (TDSB) trustees learned at a meeting Wednesday evening.
“Will we have every driver in every seat by Christmas? Probably not,” Kevin Hodgkinson, manager of the consortium that provides bus service to Toronto public and Catholic schools, told a board committee.
Weekly data requested by the ministry earlier this fall to keep tabs on the situation reveals there are pockets of Toronto, Peel, Halton and Hamilton where school buses remain subject to delays and route changes.
The most recent data from Nov. 1 shows 5,006 students and 183 routes in those regions affected by the driver shortage. Those students may have had to wait for buses, experienced longer than usual trips, used alternate transportation including taxis paid for by the bus operators and, in many cases, were transported by a driver doing multiple routes to help.
As of the start of November, 43 routes still didn’t have designated drivers, meaning kids get back and forth to school thanks to other drivers taking them on top of their existing route assignments.
“The ministry has been closely monitoring the driver shortage in the GTA,” said spokesperson Heather Irwin.
The consortia of bus companies operating in each of the affected regions were asked to provide weekly data “so that we could understand the magnitude of the problem and monitor their progress in addressing this issue,” she said.
The situation had such an impact on families and schools in September that it prompted the Ontario Ombudsman to launch a formal investigation. A spokesperson said this week the office continues to get complaints, with more than 100 received to date.
In Toronto, there are still 192 TDSB students from six schools facing delays out of a total of 20,000 who take the bus. At the Catholic board, where 30,000 kids are bused each day, 495 students at nine schools are still affected.
“Three months of this is just wrong,” TDSB trustee Sheila Cary-Meagher, one of many trustees still receiving complaints from parents, told the meeting.
“This can’t go on, it’s interfering with children’s education,” she said.
Trustees also learned that since September, the driver shortage has cost the board $44,500 for supervision of students delivered and picked up late. That’s primarily in the form of overtime to permanent staff who volunteer to work the extra hours.
Bus interruptions caused such disruption this fall that some of the operators in the Toronto Student Transportation Group consortium flew in drivers from Edmonton and hired limousine services to get kids to school.
The Alberta drivers have returned home, but there are still 23 TDSB routes being covered by taxis, according to Hodgkinson, who noted all extra costs are covered by bus operators responsible for the shortfall and not the boards.
This week, scores of bus delays continued to be reported. The Toronto Student Transportation Group website reported 57 morning delays of up to 60 minutes on Wednesday, with more than half attributed to no driver coverage.
In Peel, 77 morning delays were posted on the Student Transportation of Peel Region website.
Retaining drivers has been a major challenge for the Toronto consortium, where only 30 per cent of those who complete training end up taking a job.
“Generally during the course of the year, for every two drivers you hire, one driver quits,” Hodgkinson told the meeting.
Drivers work split shifts and earn the equivalent of about $12 to $16 an hour — which Cary-Meagher noted is less than what TDSB staff gets paid to supervise students delivered and picked up late.
Drivers are typically not compensated for time spent servicing their vehicles or driving to and from routes, and say wages do not recognize the responsibility of the job.
Last week, boards in Toronto and York Region narrowly averted a strike by 320 drivers that would have sent 18,500 students scrambling to make alternate plans. Their union, Unifor Local 4268, reached a tentative deal with First Student bus company six hours after the Nov. 3 strike deadline.