School buses.Photo: Mario Tama/Getty
Parents across the United States are facing additional stress as their children prepare toreturn to schoolamid an ongoing school bus driver shortage.
Many of the drivers have quit due to concerns related toCOVID-19. Twenty drivers with Lee County Schools in Florida quit because they were worried students would not be wearing masks, Fox affiliateWFTXreported.
“We have over 690 buses in our fleet… and we’re short about 100 drivers. We need your help,” Chesterfield Superintendent Dr. Merv Daughertysaid in a videoposted on Facebook. “We are asking you to please drive your child to school.”
EastSide Charter School in Delawareannounced on their websitethat they were also facing a bus driver shortage and would be offering parents $700 per child to drive their own kids to and from school.
The request has left many working parents in a bind, with one mother telling CBS News: “I work two jobs. I can’t get them to and from school every day.”
In Salt Lake City, Utah, the Canyons School District was so desperate for drivers that administrators told office staffers they may have to get commercial driver’s licenses to drive all the students to and from school, according to theAssociated Press.
Other districts, like Pittsburgh Public Schools, have resorted to telling their students to walk to and from school each day — a decision that has left parents enraged, CBS News reported.
“My six-year-old is not going to walk here even with a group of people,” one parent said, per the outlet.
In Michigan, some districts have limited students to riding the bus for two weeks each month, David Meeuwsen, the executive director of the Michigan Association for Pupil Transportation, told ABC affiliateWXYZ.
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As an incentive for people to help with the shortage, several districts have been offering sign-on bonuses for would-be bus drivers.
Those districts include Atlanta Public Schools, where new drivers are being offered $1,000, and Baltimore City Public Schools, which is offering $3,000 signing bonuses,CNNreported. Helena Public Schools in Montana is offering a $4,000 bonus to drivers who sign on, according to CBS News.
Additionally, a number of state school bus associations in California, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have launched statewide recruiting campaigns to bring in drivers, CNN reported.
Though the cash incentive may be enticing to some, Steve Simmons, the president of the National Association for Pupil Transport, told CBS News that he believes the issue is simply due to driver demographics and their health risk.
“You don’t typically find people that are eighteen to twenty-five driving a school bus,” Simmons explained to the outlet. “It’s people of age that are in their forties or later, and some of them may be afraid to get on a bus because of COVID. And the students that may or may not have been vaccinated.”
While the shortage appears to be a direct result of COVID-19, Rudolph Saunders, the director of public transportation forPrince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland, said the problem has been going on for some time, though the numbers have noticeably spiked in recent months.
Joanna McFarland, the co-founder and CEO of HopSkipDrive, which tracks school bus issues, echoed Saunders' sentiments, concluding from a survey she conducted in March that nearly 80 percent of districts were having trouble finding enough bus drivers, the AP reported.
“It’s really at a breaking point,” McFarland said, per the AP.
source: people.com
