School bus drivers get $3 an hour wage hike

WATERLOO REGION — Up to 500 school bus drivers are earning up to $3 an hour more.

Drivers got the increase to help retain them, to help recruit new drivers, and to keep their wages above Ontario’s rising minimum wage, now at $14 an hour.

“Driving a school bus is not a minimum wage job. And the minimum wage was catching up to them. And it’s important to keep a differential,” Benoit Bourgault, general manager of the public agency that co-ordinates busing for local students, said.

As of Feb. 1, the base wage for local drivers was boosted by $3 to $17.50, an increase of 21 per cent. Drivers are “very happy that we recognize the good service that they provide,” Bourgault said.

Many local drivers earned $15 an hour before the increase. They’re receiving an extra $2.50 per hour, an increase of 17 per cent.

The increase adds more than $800,000 to a local busing cost, which exceeds $20 million annually for Catholic and public schools. It will be paid by enrolment growth, funded provincially, and by bus efficiencies made possible in part by changing school bell times a few years ago.

Bourgault cites the rising minimum wage and also a decision by Guelph’s student busing agency to set its base wage at $17.50.

Some Ontario boards are short bus drivers, creating stress for families. Poor pay is often cited.

This region currently has six school routes without assigned drivers among its 428 routes. Temporary drivers are juggled to keep routes going.

“The economy’s very good in the region, so people have a lot of choices,” Bourgault said. “The recruitment was becoming very difficult, to attract people. This will certainly help in that. And will also help in retention.”

In other bus news, no students were reported injured in 41 bus collisions in 2016-17, according to the latest annual report of Student Transportation Services of Waterloo Region.

No student has been reported injured on a local school bus since 2014-15. To help maintain this, several safety initiatives are underway.

By April all school buses may start using alcohol monitors. Monitors will freeze a bus in place if a driver has consumed enough alcohol to trigger a warning under Ontario law.

“Every week somewhere in North America there’s a bus driver that’s driving under the influence,” Bourgault said.

“It can happen anywhere. We don’t have a problem here, but the technology is available so we elected to leverage it as a safeguard.”

The driver places a hand on the device that detects alcohol through skin. The engine will start, but the bus can’t move if enough alcohol is detected.

The current threshold to freeze the bus is a blood-alcohol level of .05 or greater.

Monitoring devices are already installed and will be put into use when technical issues are resolved.

There’s still a plan to install stop-arm cameras on local school buses.

Recordings would be used to ticket drivers who break the law when they pass school buses that have their stop signs out and lights flashing.

Ontario is crafting rules to enable automatic ticketing and Ottawa is testing cameras, Bourgault said. Implementation in this region is still without a date.