By Debbie Curtis
FRANCESVILLE, Ind. — Transportation managers across the country are coping with a shortage of school bus drivers in various ways.
In many cases, they and other school district employees – from custodians and mechanics to the principal of a Francesville, Ind., school — are getting behind the wheel to fill in gaps caused by the driver shortage.
“We only have about 5,000 people in the total labor pool, and it’s not enough,” said Dan Zylstra, principal of West Central Elementary School in Francesville who frequently fills in as a bus driver.
Zylstra is working on his doctorate in education from Indiana University and has focused on a unique subject for his dissertation: experiencing the driver shortage first-hand, he is studying ways that small school districts can use compensation and non-wage factors to recruit and train school bus drivers.
Zylstra’s district is small enough that there isn’t a full-time mechanic or a transportation director to send out on a route when short of drivers. The district superintendent fills the transportation director’s duties and the district has a garage in town that services the buses and performs small repairs. The buses are sent out of town for more complex repairs.
The entire county has a population of 11,000 people, and the school district covers half of the rural county, so there is a limited labor pool.
“The 13 drivers we have are people with spouses, or they have other jobs with flexible hours such as small business owners, or they are semi-retired,” Zylstra said. “We don’t have any farmers right now, but we used to.”
He said that despite federal transportation laws, states have their own quirks on how drivers get certified.
“So, in studying the driver shortage, there really aren’t any good broad statistics,” Zylstra said. “You can look at Bureau of Labor and Statistics data and see how much drivers should make, but those statistics don’t capture what is really going on. Every district has a different compensation format. Some districts pay by the route, others by the hour; some have benefits, some don’t.
“When you look at recruiting drivers and training them, some districts pay drivers while they train, some pay for the courses the drivers must take, some don’t,” he said. “These things are important, though. If the district is stingy while training their drivers, it’s probably going to be harder for them to get decent drivers.
“On the flip side, if the district is generous when they are training drivers, they are probably going to get more drivers and not lose those drivers after they get their licenses.”
Because there are so many variables, Zylstra can’t really do an exhaustive study on the whole state or the whole country. So he is looking at studying a small number of districts that are close to one another and he is planning to dig deeper into the details of salary and benefits and other areas of compensation and factors that affect working conditions that don’t necessarily appear in terms of dollars and cents.
Are they allowed to take the bus home? Are they responsible for washing and cleaning it? The goal is to create a study that other districts can look at and see where they fall in comparison, which will enable them to make judgments about how they can compensate and retain drivers.
The results of such as study could help small districts like Jackson County Public Schools in Jackson, Minn., which has a fleet of four large buses and one van — and few drivers.
“We have to get creative sometimes,” said Jim VanderVeen, transportation manager for the district.
Besides managing the district’s bus drivers, VanderVeen drives a special needs route, serves as the mechanic and does the bookkeeping.
Since his substitute drivers all work other jobs, they have limited availability. Two of them are also custodians, one licensed to drive big buses and the other to drive the van.
“Filling the empty spots is difficult,” VanderVeen said. “Twice last year the only sub available was the driver who is only licensed to drive the van. So, we got half the students in the van, delivered them, and then came back for the second group.
“It’s hard to recruit drivers because of the low number of hours they work, plus the hoops they must jump through to get the license. In Minnesota, it takes a lot to get a CDL.”
