But drivers only get paid for five or six hours of work a day.
#TENNESSEE SCHOOL BUS DRIVER SHORTAGE PLUS#
Mary said Detroit was offering $18 an hour and the suburbs about $20, plus a $1,000 to $3,000 bonus after 90 days. I feel sorry for the parents, but if I had a young kid, I would not be sending them to school.” They get the virus and in a couple of days, they’re dead. How many bus drivers and teachers have to die? So many have already died in Florida, Tennessee, Indiana and other states. People are losing their lives so the rich can get richer. “It’s unreal that they are bringing in the army.
New drivers are quitting after working a week or two because they are getting sick or being quarantined. That’s why most of the drivers are quitting. You’re asking a bus driver and an aide to risk their lives. “Kids have a better immune system than older drivers but if they get sick, we’re going to get COVID immediately. “We’re afraid,” Mary, a retired school bus driver in Detroit who has received several job offers, told the World Socialist Web Site.
However, older workers with underlying conditions and prospective new hires do not want to risk their lives or bring home the disease to their loved ones. Now districts are offering a meager pay bump and signing bonuses to lure retired drivers back.
But the shortage predates the pandemic and was driven by decades of bipartisan budget cutting, school bus privatization and mass layoffs, which gutted the jobs, pay and medical and retirement benefits of bus drivers. School bus drivers, many of whom are older and have underlying health conditions, are retiring in droves. In Chicago, officials have given money to parents to hire Uber drivers, and in Iowa, teachers and staff are being asked to get licenses to drive school buses. Minnesota is facing a “devastating school bus crisis,” school officials said, while Ryan Dellinger, executive director of the Pennsylvania School Bus Association, estimates there are about 1,000 unfilled bus driver jobs across the state.Īn estimated 200 school bus drivers have died during the pandemic, including dozens since the reopenings started in August. Even the few districts that said they were not short of regular drivers said they did not have enough drivers to address COVID-19 quarantines and the wave of retirements. Last week, the National Association for Pupil Transportation released the results of a national survey, which found that over half of the school transportation officials who responded were experiencing “severe” or “desperate” bus driver shortages, and nearly two-thirds stated that the driver shortage is currently their number one challenge. So far, officials in the Democratic Party-run city have not taken up Baker’s offer for military assistance. The driver shortage and last-minute routing changes have resulted in many delays since the district opened last Sunday. A bus monitor will be aboard each vehicle.īaker told reporters that if more qualified drivers could not be found, “we’ll try to serve as many communities as we can.” He said the state would be reimbursed by the federal government and added, “Obviously the goal here is to try to make sure if we have vehicles, we put people on them who are qualified to drive them and do what we can to make sure kids can get to school.”īoston Public Schools uses the private operator Transdev to transport 25,000 students each day, about half the district’s students. Military transport vans known as 7D vehicles, which have a maximum of 11 seats including the driver, will be used to drive a token number of special needs students back and forth from school. The action by the Republican governor takes place as the Biden administration and politicians from both parties risk the lives of millions of students and school employees by opening schools across the US amid the surge of COVID-19 infections and deaths.īaker said 90 soldiers would begin training Tuesday to transport students in the Chelsea, Lawrence, Lowell and Lynn school systems. Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker has deployed 250 National Guard troops to transport students in the state as school districts across the country scramble to deal with a nationwide shortage of school bus drivers brought on by the pandemic.
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