“There were various ways WCSD attempted to deal
with the shortage, including having regular hiring events, $2,000 new hire and retention incentives, a referral incentive, and a driver base wage increase to $19.93 an hour on the employer-paid retirement plan and $23.16 an hour on the employee-paid retirement plan,” said Lee. The wage increase has had the biggest impact in driv- er hiring and retention. “We are still not fully staffed but expect to be in the near future,” said Lee, adding that the district has several drivers in training and scheduled for future trainings with only six more vacancies to fill. Additionally, WCSD has its own training staff and
third-party examiners and pays for new driver training. Drivers receive employee paid benefits, qualify for public employee retirement, and are guaranteed a minimum of 5.5 hours per day, although most work seven hours or more without including trips and middays. The Salem-Keizer School District in Oregon, mean-
while, is continually redoing routes, especially for students with disabilities and those experiencing home- lessness, with the driver shortage compounding that. The district transports about 18,000 students with 300 school buses covering 220 routes. “We are continually evaluating our ridership but also
doing route consolidation,” said TJ Crocket, transporta- tion and fleet services director. “We’ve had a number of days where we can’t cover a route. We split that route up to be covered by other routes, causing route delays.” The district’s tiered routing system serves three schools: elementary, middle and high school. Route changes can impact six to eight school runs. Frequent route consolidation evaluations factor in route ridership, how late a bus will be, route impacts, and absent bus drivers. Routes run by drivers on long-term leave are more likely to be broken apart. “We don’t want to take routes away from drivers, al-
though we have had to do that in some instances,” said Crocket.
This is the second consecutive school year the district
has consolidated routes, which is largely driven by driver shortages. In the first year, more COVID-related illnesses forced drivers out for a certain time period. “This year, we’ve had as much sickness, but absences
are not for the same length of time,” said Crocket, adding there have been a “few bad weeks” due to COVID outages. Toward the end of January, the department was about
22 drivers short of being fully staffed. “You’ve got to plan for 10 percent of your staff to be gone
due to illness, vacation or whatever,” said Crocket. “We’re not able to weather that absent rate because of the driver shortage. One take-away from COVID is, while I need the drivers here, please don’t come in and make others sick.” Some drivers decided to not return to work after the onset of the pandemic, when classes were remote,
hybrid and then resumed to fully in-person. The driver shortage pre-dates the pandemic but was compounded by it. In 2019, the district lost 25 more than it hired. In the 2020-2021 school year, one-third of the drivers left. Last year, the district trained more drivers than had left. Successful recruiting tools include banners, district job fairs, referrals, a $1,500 bonus, and wages crossing the $20 per hour mark. The biggest reason for rerouting is for special educa-
tion routes, which outnumber general education routes due in part to adding buses for students served under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act. Crocket said it seems more students are also getting
identified with an IEP, “which is probably catching up, because we’ve gone through some time where we weren’t able to support them the whole year [during virtual learning] and then in coming back to school, try- ing to navigate challenging behavior with students and making sure we don’t over-identify students because the population as a whole had some behavior issues.” Drivers feel a lot of pressure in the current situation.
The goal is to make it to school 20 minutes before the bell time as to not impact breakfast or the school day. “If we are too much delayed beyond that, then we
don’t make our second tier on time,” said Lee. The district emphasizes safety in all cases. “There’s a
variety of reasons we might end up late on a route in addition to tight routing—weather, traffic, a crash,” said Crocket, adding the district uses ParentSquare to inform parents of bus delays exceeding 15 minutes. “The other thing we do is we just own it,” he said. “We say
it’s due to the driver shortage. We try our best to not impact the same school on a regular basis and rotate that around.”
The Assistance of Multi-Tier Bell Times Within the last year, TransPar worked with 27 districts in 15 states, helping assess and develop solutions for several challenges, including the worst driver shortage the industry has experienced, noted Micah Brassfield, the company’s director of advisory services. For example, TransPar conducted a bell time and route
efficiency analysis for the Tippecanoe School District in Indiana. The company identified the benefits and chal- lenges associated with the district’s three and four-tier systems, resulting in the development of a four-tier system reducing 15 routes. “We are also conducting a walk zone analysis for
Tippecanoe, allowing the district to more strongly stew- ard its future transportation resources by following suit with its district neighbors and implementing safe walk- ing/biking zones for students to get to and from school,” Brassfield added. TransPar also partnered with Indiana’s Metropolitan School District of Washington Township to analyze two- and three-tier systems via a bell time and route effi-
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