South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Bus driver shortage leaves students waiting for hours
A shortage of school bus drivers has created chaos this school year, as some students have waited hours for buses that were so packed, the only place to sit was on the floor,
Many drivers are now working extra hours and picking up twice as many kids as their normal load to pick up the slack. Mechanics, transportation managers and anyone with a commercial driver’s license are being asked to fill in.
School districts say they are desperately trying to fill hundreds of vacancies, attributed to COVID-19 and a labor market short on job seekers. They’re doing heavy marketing online and on TV and considering higher pay, with Broward already raising driver pay by more than $1 an hour.
Right now, the Palm Beach County School District has 146 vacancies, or 21% of its total positions. Broward has about 200 vacancies, or 17% of its positions.
Comparable figures were not available for Miami-Dade County, although officials say a switch from a seven-hour to eight-hour day for drivers has enabled them to cover most of their routes.
Parents and students say they’ve definitely noticed a need for more drivers. Last school year, at least half of students were learning at home, so the demand was less, and school officials were able to block off seats for social distancing. This year, schools are back at 100%, and the driver shortage, buses are more crowded than ever.
“The bus situation is beyond poor,” said Lance Bressler, whose daughter attends
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland. “There are so many kids on the bus creating a health and safety issue, and nobody does a thing. She is getting home hours after school ends.”
At nearby Westglades Middle, the bus was consistently late picking up kids at bus stops during the first three weeks after school started Aug. 18, parent Christopher Merlino said.
“When it did arrive it was so crowded they had to leave kids behind and come back,” resulting in many kids being late to school, Merlino said. “We had the same problem on the return. My son was denied boarding and was told they would come back for him.”
Raymond Adderly, a senior at Fort Lauderdale High who lives in Coral Springs, said buses were especially bad the first week of school.
“On the second day of school, my bus is scheduled for 6:26 a.m. It was 8:30 and I was still there,” said Adderly, the student government representative on the School Board. “I had to catch an Uber to school,
and I missed my entire first-period class.”
Last week, Broward schools sent out a message asking parents for patience.
“Please rest assured that transportation is working diligently to provide the best service possible during these challenging times,” the message said.
Palm Beach County, which started Aug. 10, had similar complaints during its first week of school, but those have largely subsided, even though the need for drivers is still great, school district officials said.
“The District is getting the job done, thanks to our dedicated staff of mechanics and other behind-the-scenes workers, who have the class of license necessary to drive a school bus and are pitching in when needed,” district spokeswoman Claudia Shea said in an email.
School Board member Karen Brill said she’s noticed longer parent pickup lines than normal at schools.
She doesn’t know if that’s due to frustrations over bus service or concerns about COVID-19.
Palm Beach County School Board member Alexandria Ayala said a school bus driver’s job is “taxing and difficult,” and she plans to ask the School Board to raise driver pay, which now starts at $16 an hour. The Broward School Board agreed last week to raise starting pay from $15.41 an hour to $16.50.
The labor market is bad for districts trying to hire drivers, with competition from companies like Amazon and FedEx, experts say.
Right now, school bus driver pay is about $3 an hour less than other jobs requiring a commercial driver’s license, said Siri Terjesen, a professor and associate dean in the College of Business at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. The jobs are also seasonal when school is in session, which may not be attractive to people who want to work all year, she said.
Terjesen said a bus driver shortage is one that’s more noticeable to the public than jobs in many other fields.
“This is an issue where we see the impact in our daily lives when you have kids who are not picked up on time,” she said.
Districts are creating ads and promotional videos, touting the advantages of being a driver, such as good health insurance and retirement benefits and plenty of time off.
“When my kids are off, I’m off. That’s a great benefit ot me because I get to do stuff with them,” Mark Rubenstein, a Palm Beach County school bus driver, said in a promotional video airing on a district-owned TV station.
“The reason I got involved is I want to help children,” Rubenstein said in the ad. “I believe in the public school system. I wanted to do something that can make a difference, and as a bus driver, you really can make a difference.”