PARENTS, STUDENTS, CCSD GRAPPLE WITH LATE BUSES
Familiar refrain tests parents’ patience; district says it’s doing what it can under the circumstances
Vanderburg Elementary School in Henderson lets out at 3:11 p.m.
A bus pulled up Thursday to pick up Josh Flory’s two youngest children, a kindergartner and second-grader, along with other kids, just before 4 o’clock.
Flory called it “early.” His idea of late is shaped by the reality that 90% of the time, by his estimate, his kids’ buses arrive unpredictably but substantially later than their scheduled times, morning or afternoon.
“They’ve been as late as 90 minutes,” he said. “Some days they don’t come at all.”
The bus for Rebecca Garcia’s middle-schooler runs late 40% of the time, she says.
That’s not an estimate. She tallies the mobile alerts she gets from Clark County School District’s transportation department.
“I’ve done the math,” she said.
Clark County schools are down hundreds of bus drivers in a sprawling district where about 125,000 students require transportation. Officials say the shortage isn’t sudden, but it is now at unprecedented levels, compounded by the pandemic. And frazzled parents don’t see any solution in sight.
A CCSD spokesman said the transportation department, ideally, would like to have 1,570 drivers to adequately operate but is down about 240. The shortage — about 15 percent this year — has been an intermittent national issue for years, and with a staff that large there will always be openings — the Sun reported 51 driver vacancies in May 2017.
By the 2018-2019 school year, CCSD saw its vacancies begin to increase.
Every few days, someone starts a thread about busing woes in the CCSD Parents Facebook group that Garcia moderates, and posts flood in about children not getting to school until second period, about kids giving up and staying home all day, or screenshots of text alerts or emails saying a bus will be 35, 90, 245 minutes — that’s four hours — late. Buses fill, and overflow buses come even later.
Flory said the district had given no detailed plan or timeline for remedy, just an acknowledgement that it’s “aware of the issue.”
“Which is infuriating because if you’re aware of the issue and choosing to do nothing about the issue, that makes it even worse from the public’s point of view,” he said.
CCSD chief operating officer Mike Casey told parents this month that drivers weren’t laid off during last year’s pandemic-driven school closures, but budgetary uncertainty temporarily put the district under a hiring freeze.
The district is now able to hire but the onboarding process can take two months, which includes training, background checks and, for some, getting a commercial driver’s license at district expense.
“Believe me, we truly understand in terms of the level of regency that’s required,” Casey said during a livestreamed question-and-answer session on Sept. 13 with the CCSD Parents Facebook group. “We are trying to address it to the best that we can. It’s just been very difficult.”
director of transportation, said on the Aug. 31 episode of the podcast for the industry publication School Transportation News that even the transportation department’s accountant has picked up a route.
“We are feeling exactly what every other district, what every other transit company is feeling right now,” she said.
Nationwide problem
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker said this month, just a few days into the school year, that he activated 250 members of his state’s National Guard to transport students, at federal cost, in several districts.
The Philadelphia School District doubled its incentive, from $150 to $300 a month, to have parents make their own transportation arrangements. Inspired by Massachusetts’ action, the Phildelphia superintendent said he called Pennsylvania’s governor to explore putting the National Guard behind the wheel of buses. He was also considering asking Amazon, which has a hub in the city, to loan drivers.
Across the state in Pittsburgh, the first day of school was pushed back two weeks for lack of bus drivers, even with the district’s contractor offering wages of $26 an hour and $1,000 hiring bonuses.and in the Reno area, the Washoe County school board in June approved tapping pandemic relief funds to pay $2,000 hiring bonuses and $1,000 referral bonuses. Washoe County needed to fill about 40 open driver spots in the 62,000-student district. It’s still hiring.
A spokesperson for Gov. Steve Sisolak’s office said Thursday that the state hadn’t received any formal requests to make the Nevada National Guard available to drive CCSD school buses.
A national survey taken this summer by school transportation industry groups queried about 1,500 districts, and found that about half would describe their driver shortage as “severe” or “desperate.” Only 1% said that driver shortage is not a problem.
“As school districts across the country return to in-person learning and COVID continues to have an impact on education in general and school transportation scheduling and logistics in particular, the shortage of school bus drivers has become conspicuous,” Mike Martin, executive director of the National Association for Pupil Transportation, said in a statement. “But let’s be clear – this is not a new problem. Nor (is it) easy to solve.”
Recruiting drivers
Casey said the 45 or so drivers who previously only drove interscholastic sports teams to and from games have been put in the regular daily pool, and sports runs have been farmed out to charter outfits so the district drivers can get a long enough break before morning shifts.
The district also has consolidated 25 routes. It also is considering hiring and retention bonuses and partnering with the RTC public transit system.
“It’s a struggle for drivers because we’re asking a lot of them,” Casey said. “It’s very difficult to service these students, and they’re doing their best in the shortage.”
Former driver Denice Chandler-bassett drove for CCSD off and on for 27 years. She quit for the final time in 2016 but remains close to current drivers. She said they don’t feel they can speak freely about their work conditions, so she speaks for them.
“It doesn’t seem to matter at this point what they’re doing, nothing’s making anybody happy,” she said. “The school district’s not happy, the parents aren’t happy, the kids are miserable, the drivers are miserable.”
When Chandler-bassett started driving in 1989, she had the same routes every day, with a roster of riders who called her Miss D. She knew the students and their habits and their parents. Drivers now are assigned wherever, sometimes on unfamiliar routes.
Children and parents have become less respectful, more intimidating and more demanding with fewer consequences, she said. Drivers aren’t allowed to physically intervene in fights, and children aren’t disciplined like they would be if they acted out on campus. Other motorists are impatient and aggressive, she said.
For this, drivers earn between $15.67 and $19.98 an hour, working as few as 30 hours a week over split shifts.
Chandler-bassett said she earned $15.27 an hour in 2014.
Between the pay, liability and stress, there’s now no incentive to stay, even though drivers are well-intentioned, she said.
“You don’t work for a school district if you don’t want to help kids get better and do more,” she said. “You don’t just go, ‘I really hate kids. I think I’ll go drive a school bus.’”
Flory, the dad in Henderson, said he monitored the district’s real-time bus locater app to decide if he should drive his younger kids to school. His eldest, a ninth-grader, is more independent and can weather the spotty transportation to Coronado High School, but the little ones get stressed.
He said he felt for drivers, who he said worked hard. He supports increasing their pay and cracking down on bad rider behavior. For parents, the district could expand before-school care to give them the flexibility to drop their kids off earlier — and bringing in the National Guard sounds like a good stopgap here too, he suggested.
Garcia, who has three children still in school and is also president of the statewide Nevada PTA, speaks highly of the education her children receive, once they get to school. But contacting the transportation department with issues is a “waste of time,” she said.
Her middle-schooler gets the worst service, she said. His stop is the first on the morning route, scheduled for 6:26 a.m., but the district’s app will often say his bus is held up by heavy traffic. Garcia said at that sleepy hour, she finds that hard to believe.
As a small-business consultant, she works from home and can drive her kids to school, but she knows not everybody, especially in her east-side neighborhood, is so fortunate or even has a car.
“I think we’ve moved past frustration to full outrage for some parents,” she said.