![]() Ohio’s school buses travel a million miles each school day. Reggie Wade is a writer for Yahoo Finance.The start of the school year has been a rough ride for many kids who haven’t been on a regular schedule for more than a year, and for districts that are struggling with thousands of COVID cases among students and staff.īut there’s another problem that’s grinding school operations across the state toward a stop – a bus driver shortage.Ī bus pulling away from the curb sounds like the end of summer to some 800,000 Ohio kids and their parents. It’s a systemic problem for the industry," she continued. It’s not just, ‘Oh, we’re going to have a couple of job fairs and give out bonuses and we’re going to solve this problem. ![]() “This is a crisis that everybody is feeling now but this is a long term problem. It’s a split-shift job and the pay is lower,” McFarland noted. It’s really hard to find people that want to do this job now. “There’s been a school bus driver shortage for over a decade … You could make a lot more money per hour, drive more hours, driving a truck or driving for Amazon or doing other things that are in high demand. McFarland also pointed out that the competition to keep school bus drivers behind the wheel is stiffer than ever due to the likes of Amazon ( AMZN) and others. Every driver has five years of caregiving experience that we can get through our process, much faster than a school district or a contractor can recruit, train and hire a school driver,” she said. "We put drivers through a very rigorous process, background, and check fingerprints. She says that the company can get drivers up and running far faster in non-school bus vehicles such as cars or vans. states, said her company has seen an uptick in business during the school bus driver shortage. Joanna Newman McFarland, co-founder and CEO of ride service company HopSkipDrive which provides transportation services for children in 9 U.S. It’s a situation that’s of course not isolated to that segment, but fairly broad based where essentially the COVID crisis led to pretty significant job losses, across that sector and we’re slow to see a return of the type of personnel that is qualified and willing to do the job,” Daco said. “We’re continuing to see some significant supply constraints. economist at Oxford Economics, tells Yahoo Finance that the pandemic has exacerbated a long-time issue. ![]() Lake Oswego, OR, USA - Sep 8, 2021: Now Hiring School Bus Drivers sign is seen next to an empty school bus operated by STA (Student Transportation of America) in Lake Oswego, Oregon. “In some states, they require fingerprinting and also background checks, and you have to be medically certified … We can’t have a hiring event and put somebody behind the wheel next week." “Depending upon the state or just the number of requirements, one around the CDL (commercial drivers' license), getting a commercial learner’s permit, there’s a fair amount of in-class learning that has to go on behind the wheel test, written test," he said. Hiring, he says, can take as long as 3 weeks. One of the biggest challenges, Macysyn says, is training and hiring delays. But we’re working with folks at the state and federal level to, create systems where we can hopefully attract drivers and get them through the CDL system a little bit quicker than normal,” he said. “I would caution that we’re going to expect that the driver shortage will remain severe throughout this entire school year. And more than 50% of respondents described their driver shortage as “severe” or “desperate”.Ĭurt Macysyn, director of the National School Transportation Association (NSTA), said the situation is slowly improving but not by much. Seventy-nine percent of respondents in the Northeast said they have altered service, 77% in the Midwest, 66% percent in the South, and 80% in the West. We’ve got to make sure they have good benefits that will help with those kinds of jobs,” he added.Īccording to an August survey by the National Association for Pupil Transportation (NAPT) and other agencies, every region of the country is currently altering transportation services due to COVID-10. We’re seeing this in Anne Arundel County here in Maryland, where bus drivers actually went on strike, so we’ve got to pay folks more. "It’s been a challenge to get folks back to work.
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