COVID made bus-driver shortage worse, delaying in-person return. What will fix it?
To get more Fayette County students back to in person learning, the school district in Lexington will encourage current district employees who work in other areas to train as school bus drivers for a stipend or possibly change school start times.
The district may also start using nine passenger vans to transport more kids, increase driver pay, restructure driver positions, employ a specialist to recruit and retain school bus drivers and continue to use a staffing agency, said district Chief Operating Officer Myron Thompson.
At a Monday night school board meeting, Thompson provided more details on the school bus driver shortage preventing widespread in-person learning and efforts to fix it.
Thompson explained that although leaders have been closely monitoring staff levels, as the return to in-person learning grew closer, several employees left the district or took a leave.
K-2 students returned Monday to in-person learning, and grades 3-5 are expected to return in March 3-5. All other grades will return by March 15, district officials said Tuesday night. However, the shortage has caused a delay in the return for special programs.
Until the buses went back on the road the first day back, leaders couldn’t definitively say how many routes could be covered. Given the success of the first day, Thompson said there are enough drivers to cover the daily routes for all preschool and elementary school students, as well as those who attend the 12 large middle schools and six large high schools, which account for 95 percent of students in the district.
The challenge now is how to support transportation for the district’s middle and high school programs, including the three technical centers, Carter G. Woodson Academy, Family Care Center, Martin Luther King Academy, Opportunity Middle College, STEAM Academy, Success Academy, The Learning Center and The Stables.
Thompson said a district team is working on creative solutions to provide transportation for the 1,885 students who attend those 11 programs
There are typically 19,500 out of nearly 41,000 students riding Fayette school buses. School board members said Monday that many bus riders didn’t have other means of transportation.
As of last week out of 283 positions, there were 35 driver vacancies and typically there are only 10 to 15 vacancies. There were 24 drivers on leave and typically there are only 5 to 7 on leave.
The district needs 258 drivers for all schools, 217 drivers for neighborhood schools alone.
As of Monday night, numbers had slightly improved so that there were 229 filled positions, Thompson said. About 20 bus drivers call in absent each day. There are up to 15 substitutes and 29 other staff members such as mechanics trained to drive school buses.
The district for years has worked on the driver shortage that has gotten worse with COVID. The district explored outsourcing, attempted to partner with LexTran, and approached charter bus companies about contracting services, with no success.
In January 2019, the district raised the hourly wage for bus drivers from $14.20 to $17.76.
In 2019, all driver positions were filled. But in March, 19 transportation employees tested positive for COVID and several were hospitalized. One employee died in April, Thompson said.
A local staffing agency has been working to hire more transportation employees, but that hasn’t yielded many candidates.
Applications are down 75 percent because of more people getting unemployment benefits and people being afraid that they will be exposed to COVID if they drive a bus, Thompson said.
Challenges of getting the needed license to drive a school bus and an odd schedule that requires morning and afternoon work and a break mid day are adding to the shortage.
Some approaches to the problem cannot fully be vetted until the school buses are driving more students on a daily basis and district officials determine what works, Thompson said.
This story was originally published February 23, 2021 at 3:47 PM.