The school district I live in is desperate for new bus drivers. They take no blame for their own actions and point fingers at everything else. It was unemployment checks for a while, now people are just too lazy.
They did do a good thing a while ago and raise the starting wage from about $17 to $18 and hour, but we are talking about a job with a highly irregular schedule doing a specialized task and dealing with children. It’s hard for drivers to take on a second job because the hours they are available are at odd times in the middle of the day and they can’t be flexible on that.
So how has the school district tried to solve this? At first it was make everyone in the Transpo department with a Class B license drive pick up routes. Not hired to be a driver but have a license? Your driving two to three routes in the morning and two to three in the afternoon. Mornings can start at 5am and afternoon routes can go till 5pm.
They still were short so they didn’t raise wages, or offer better incentives, they just moved all pick up locations for middle and high schools to centralized locations. Then they canceled pick-up for two days out of the week and required parents to arrange transportation. Different schools had different off days.
Oh, and the people training new drivers are having to drive so training went from three weeks to sometimes six.
We’ll now they are still desperate. Drivers are getting burned out and still not sticking around. Guess what their solution is now?
Now they are offering school admins and certified teachers $30/hour if they get their CDL over the summer and help cover the driver needs for their school.
So clearly they are desperate enough to pay someone $30/hour to drive a bus, just not the people hired to drive the bus. This some scab tactics for sure.