Nationwide School Bus Driver Shortage Being Felt In Bourne
It’s been almost three years since COVID-19 forced the world to shut down, but many school systems are still struggling to bounce back. The biggest problem? A severe shortage of school bus drivers.
The problem is nationwide in scope and began to rear its head pre-pandemic. It is being felt right here in Bourne and across Cape Cod’s communities, which may be partly due to the disproportion of rising costs of living in these communities.
Jordan Geist, Bourne Public Schools business services manager, briefly addressed the topic at the Bourne School Committee’s first meeting of the 2022-2023 school year. It is not just a Bourne problem, he said, explaining that the Cape Cod Collaborative—the organization that provides school bus services to Bourne, Mashpee, and other districts down-Cape—has been fielding this issue since pre-COVID.
“As far as the driver shortage, it’s not [only] a statewide [issue]; it’s a national issue that we’re going to continue to work through,” he said.
In an interview with the Enterprise, Mr. Geist said that Bourne used to have 22 school bus drivers for the district’s 22 routes, but they are now working with 18 drivers operating condensed routes.
“Last year, we had to reduce two routes because of the driver shortage, and this year it’s the same,” Mr. Geist said. “We had to condense routes. In some cases it causes you to be more cost-effective for sure; but in other cases, the routes are a little bit longer, and the schedule is a little bit tighter than we’d like it to be.”
The biggest issue Bourne faces, Mr. Geist said, is finding coverage for bus drivers who call out sick. Home-school transportation takes priority, but other problems the district faces include a lack of flexibility to schedule field trips and longer routes that inhibit transportation availability for athletic games.
He commended Sue Downing, the district’s transportation director, for her ability to coordinate things on the fly and communicate effectively with the district’s drivers, educators, sports coordinators, and families.
A Look At Fixing The Problem
When Doug Schaejbe was 22 years old, a colleague of his in Salem, who drove a school bus for years, told him to get his commercial driver’s license.
“She said, ‘Get your school bus license because you will never go without work,’” Mr. Schaejbe recalled. “She said get licensed, so I did, and, I mean, she was right.”
Mr. Schaejbe, now a Buzzards Bay resident, has been driving for nearly three decades, typically driving the morning routes before heading off to another job. He started driving for the Cape Cod Collaborative in 2017 and made bus driving a full-time gig after retiring from a career at Verizon at the end of 2021.
“Historically, in the 30-some-odd years I’ve been driving, a lot of times there are not enough drivers,” Mr. Schaejbe said, adding that this is not the first shortage he has seen. “It’s been kind of an ongoing thing where they just always need drivers.”
One of the routes originally cut when BPS was forced to condense bus routes belonged to Mr. Schaejbe.
“I had had the same route pretty much since 2017,” he said. “When we went back in September 2020, they [the district] were short by two drivers—well, probably more—and cut out two routes, and it was still short by, I think, two drivers. And one of those routes was mine.”
He had to take a new route, but it worked out because part of the new bus route included some students he knew from the old route.
“I was like ‘Well, I know the kids, so I’ll do this one,’ and that’s the one I’ve had ever since,” Mr. Schaejbe said. The result, however, was a longer elementary route, meaning Mr. Schaejbe’s bus is one of the last ones to return from dropping off students.
“They can’t really do much with me to combine [routes],” he said, “but they have a couple of other routes that are shorter that they do combine.”
Luckily, Mr. Schaejbe and Mr. Geist each concurred, the consequences of condensing and creating longer routes have not been as severe in Bourne as in other places across the state and nation. Last month in Ohio, for example, students in one school district were forced to return to remote learning due to a severe deficit in school bus drivers. And in Vermont, a district superintendent is looking to get a commercial driver’s license of his own, allowing him to take the wheel—literally and figuratively—amidst the struggle to find and maintain drivers.
Bourne’s shortage has not reached that degree of severity just yet, but rising costs of living in and around Cape Cod have made it difficult for service workers of any type to make a home here—something that has been evident in the post-pandemic era of small and local business shutdowns, shortages, and general struggles.
“I think the problem is that it is really a part-time job,” Mr. Schaejbe said. “Someone can’t rely on this to be their only source of income and actually be able to live. We get paid a good hourly wage but it’s not enough hours [per] week. So most people are doing it in conjunction with another job.”
Mr. Schaejbe himself did this for years, as did many of his colleagues, whom he said have spanned a wide demographic of people: firefighters working on their off-days, stay-at-home parents, retirees, and morning route drivers like Mr. Schaejbe, who balanced another career as a main source of income. But in almost all of these situations, driving a school bus tends to serve as an extra source of income, not a primary one.
Paul Hilton, executive director at the Cape Cod Collaborative, recognizes this, and the organization has been working to close this gap by not only offering incentives to new drivers but by offering competitive pay rates and benefit programs. The Collaborative, Mr. Hilton said, pays $29/hour to school bus drivers on the mainland ($41 for drivers on Nantucket), pays 55 percent of benefits, and offers six-month bonuses to new drivers as incentives.
But even still, finding and maintaining drivers has proved to be a struggle. Mr. Geist said that Bourne has tried to be competitive in the job market, but there is a balance to it as well.
“It’s one of those things,” he said. “We try to find the balance. You need to stay competitive, but there’s always a ripple effect.” He referenced the ongoing shortage of substitute teachers that is plaguing some districts around the country, explaining that “if one town ups the sub pay, then [they are] stealing all the subs from the other towns. And then you get into a price war.”
Potential price wars aside, the first obstacle to hiring drivers at a competitive rate is that there must be enough CDL drivers to fulfill the open roles. But the very process of obtaining a CDL and the required endorsements to drive a school bus, Mr. Hilton explained, is a stringent one that requires a certain degree of commitment. In summary, getting licensed to drive a school bus requires a physical exam, a written exam, at least 60 hours of training, and a road test—and these tests “are not simple,” Mr. Hilton said.
A separate but concurrent issue that has exacerbated the shortage of bus drivers has, of course, been the COVID-19 pandemic. The nature of the job itself has often historically appealed, like Mr. Schaejbe noted, to people who are retirees who enjoy the early mornings and afternoon shifts and usually do it for supplementary income. But since the pandemic began, some of the retiree population that once made up a large portion of school bus drivers has found themselves unable to return to driving once school resumed, due to the risk of exposure.
“I think it’s stabilized in what we’re using,” Mr. Hilton said, “but we’re going to have to continue. It’s reaching the point at which we know that there’s going to be a certain number [of drivers] leaving that we’re going to have to replace just to tread water.”
Work That Matters
What led to the current school bus driver shortage was really a perfect storm of unfortunate events happening simultaneously. As Mr. Hilton puts it: “there’s been an increase in requirements for a commercial driver’s license, for the passenger and school bus endorsements for them; there has been a tightening of the job market, and there has been a separation of the income that can be earned at what is a well-paying part-time or full-time job [and] the housing market, especially in this region.”
Another kind of shortage is taking its toll on bus drivers and the greater sector of service workers in general: a general lack of respect for service work and those who perform it.
“The job market changed and the general respect for people doing service work in the general population has decreased,” Mr. Hilton said. “Not as many people know or respect their bus driver as they did before. They want to know where the bus is and why it didn’t go exactly the way they wanted it to.”
School bus drivers are critically important to the functioning of schools, Mr. Hilton said, adding that the sentiment is something he asked school administrators to reflect on as communities come together to bridge the gap left by the shortage.
“The bus driver is the first person [students] see in the morning and the last in the afternoon,” he said. “And that matters.”
And for Mr. Schaejbe, the work really is all about the students.
“I love the kids,” he said. “They’re so funny, they really just make me laugh.”
He has a seemingly endless cache of silly stories about kids on the school bus. One young girl, he said, was especially chatty one day when the bus just so happened to pass by an apartment complex getting its septic pumped.
“I hear, ‘What is that delightfully delicious stinky smell?’ And I’m like, ‘They’re pumping out the septic’ and she’s like, ‘I love that smell,’” Mr. Schaejbe recalled. “I had to drive by it again because it’s one-way in and one-way out, and she’s like ‘There’s that smell again, I love that smell.’ And I’m just thinking, ‘Oh my god, these kids are funny.’”
Mr. Schaejbe’s bus route runs the gamut, picking up high schoolers, middle schoolers, and younger kids from the intermediate school. He thoroughly enjoys his time with the students, knows all their names, and waves to the parents who have gotten to know him through the years. This year, when he got a portion of his old route back, he said that students and parents alike were excited to see him behind the wheel, knowing they would be under the care of the same school bus driver they have had for years. And older siblings who were on Mr. Schaejbe’s school bus in previous years always make a point to come find him when he is parked outside the school and say “Hi, Mr. Doug!”
“I don’t think people recognize the impact that you can have, good or bad, by starting the kids’ day off right,” he said.
Bus drivers being so connected to the community of the school and of the town—like Mr. Schaejbe—is key to making an impact and helping schools function, Mr. Hilton said. In his mind, there are three parts of school bus driving that make the educational world go ‘round: it is a fun, meaningful job that can have a positive impact; the children are appreciative of good bus drivers; and it is critical to the function of schools.
“If the kids can’t get to school, they can’t learn,” Mr. Hilton said. “Bus driving is a critically important element, and I think it’s going to force people to refocus on how critically important it is to the students and to the functioning of the school. I think that achievement for students is important as we focus on social-emotional development and the people that support students day to day, minute to minute have got to become important.”
While Bourne, Cape Cod and the nation at large are not out of the woods just yet when it comes to the school bus driver shortage, strides are being made in a variety of ways to close the gap. But the tipping point? According to Mr. Hilton, it will have to be better compensation.
“I think wages for bus drivers are going to have to go up and continue to go up,” he said. “That’s just the way things are.”