Busman Shortage Driving Schools Crazy

Janice Hauck gets up at 5 a.m., gets behind the wheel of a big, yellow school bus at 6 a.m. and tries to maintain order among as many as 40 kids while keeping her eyes on the road. She has a few hours off around the middle of the day, then it’s back on the bus.

Not everyone would do the same.

And that’s the problem.

School districts around the country are practically begging for qualified bus drivers who will work odd hours for low pay and few benefits--and who can pass strict new federal and state guidelines, including drug tests.

Schools have tough competition, especially with the economy going strong and the nation’s unemployment rate a low 5% or so. In the Kansas City area and in Arkansas, schools have lost drivers to riverboat casino jobs. In Wichita it was the aircraft industry.

Sometimes even flipping burgers is more attractive. Kevin Orzechowski, a Midwest regional director at Laidlaw Transit, a bus contractor, said his company often competes with Wal-Mart or McDonald’s, which can promise a full 40-hour workweek.

Then there are the passengers.

“The kids are just getting a little tougher to handle,” Orzechowski said.

Earlier this year in St. Louis, a young man boarded a school bus and opened fire, killing a pregnant high school student and wounding the driver.

Larry Busch, contract manager for School Services and Leasing, which supplies about 425 drivers to the Wichita district, said drivers have had to break up fights between students swinging padlocks wrapped in bandannas.

Busch said he loses many drivers who decide they would rather get behind the wheel of a truck.

“Why transport kids when you can transport boxes?” Busch said. “They don’t lip off to you.”

Karen Finkel, executive director of the National School Transportation Assn., said most districts have struggled to find drivers since about two years ago. “It’s certainly not like back in the ‘80s, when the whole country was in a recession and we had a wide pool to choose from,” she said.

Last month, the Chicago Board of Education fired two transportation officials for failing to anticipate driver shortages that left hundreds of students stranded during the first week of the new school year.

And districts in the Kansas City and St. Louis areas had difficulty finding enough drivers to start school this fall.

Districts across Massachusetts, including Boston, have had trouble too, and in many cases, company owners and management are driving buses. School systems in Portland, Ore., and suburban Phoenix also have had a problem.

The turnover is so bad that about 30% of the 7,000 drivers Orzechowski’s company hired in the Midwest in September 1995 were gone by the end of the year.

Since Jan. 1, the federal government has required drug testing for all school bus drivers, and states in recent years have been phasing in requirements that drivers also have a commercial license.

Randy Spratt, superintendent of the Marion County school system in Philadelphia, Mo., said he had to drive a school bus for nine weeks when Missouri began requiring commercial driver’s licenses about two years ago. Spratt has had to fill in occasionally since then because of the time needed for new drivers to get licensed.

Simply placing want ads doesn’t work. In Wichita, school transportation officials last year pleaded on the local news for applicants. A raise of about $1 an hour and a direct mailing to neighborhoods helped avoid another driver shortage this year.

Richard Jackson, operations supervisor for Atlanta’s school transportation department, said his district had a problem until it started paying drivers $11 an hour, plus benefits. “That problem almost went away. We almost have to beat people away,” he said.

After 24 years on the job in Wichita, Hauck has enough seniority to work nearly 40 hours a week.

But in Wichita most new drivers, who start at $8 an hour, are unemployed during the summer. And many work a split shift for a total of four to six hours a day. Even Hauck recently applied for a steadier job in the aircraft industry, though she wasn’t hired.

Maggie Silvertooth, 10, spends about an hour each day with Hauck, and she likes having the same driver.

“You know them better,” she said. “Usually they are nicer.”