The million dollar question: How can we, once and for all, resolve the problem of school bus driver shortages that plague our industry? The answer sadly is, we probably can’t.
When I arrived on the scene in 1995, the number one concern that I and other employers faced was driver shortages. When I retired four months ago, from the exact same position, driver shortage was still my number one challenge, albeit it was not nearly as bad as two decades earlier, because we did lots of creative things to close the gap.
Everyone remembers the struggles of meeting the budget when exorbitant fuel prices unexpectedly hit us in 2008 and then lasted for several years. While operational situations like that come and go, the one constant seems to be school bus driver shortages, and as one would expect, it is now getting a bit worse with an improving economy and lower unemployment.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1.2 million job vacancies are likely for registered nurses between 2014 and 2022. Why is this important to know? Well, as we consider our own plight, it’s helpful to draw a comparison because it shows that even full-time, benefitted positions with starting salaries of $60,000 a year or higher are difficult to fill. Then why doesn’t everyone become an RN for that kind of money?
Well, besides long wait lists for nursing school, there are other aspects of the job, some similar to driving a school bus, that make it unattractive to many. Working with sick patients all day, every day takes someone special, just as is the case on the school bus, where drivers are expected to work with sometimes unruly children who are often spreading germs. The challenges of each job don’t stop there. Shift work is a given for nurses, and it is commonly recognized as one of the most unattractive components of being a school bus driver. Ten hours on-site at the transportation facility, while only earning six hours pay, is hard to celebrate. Both professions are difficult and both professions expose employees to both physical and emotional stress.
There are very few school districts or bus contractors who I’ve spoken with who do not face this challenge year after year. I visited more than 300 school district websites in the past month, and 92 percent say that they are in need of school bus drivers.
There are two parts to driver staffing. The first part is retention. As a director, make retention one of your daily leadership activities. Do everything you can to simply keep the ones you already have. Remember how happy you were when HR called to say, “We’ve hired another new driver for you,” and the special treatment you showed the candidate when they walked through your door for the first time? That should never end. Even when they give you cause to be less than happy with their performance, find a way to encourage them, thank them for all the things they do well and challenge them to improve. You’ve invested a lot of time and money into the drivers you currently have; don’t waste it.
You’re going to have driver attrition for causes that you have no control over, such as moving from the area, graduating from college, medical issues, and natural retirement, to name a few. Make certain that you and your staff are never the reason you have “another vacancy.” Do the little things, like always being present for them. I taught one of my young supervisors, who incidentally went on to replace me when I recently retired, “Don’t ever forget, our most important job is caring for our people, and we must do it every single day and it comes before we do anything else.” We can take piles of paperwork home with us at night, but we can’t possibly connect with our people by sitting behind our desks or sitting in meetings all day.
Make certain that every single day, you stop by the driver lounge, at the time clock, walk throughout the bus lot during pre-trips, board their buses, etc. Enjoy your people. Smile at them, laugh with them, take pictures with them, encourage and compliment them, learn something about them and their families, recognize them on their birthdays. Isn’t that the care and admiration you want your boss to show you? The list of things you can do to keep your employees and to keep them happy is endless. In a future article, I will share many of the things that we do for our drivers that make a difference and in part is why our turnover rate is now so low.
The second part of driver staffing is recruitment. There is no limit to the recruiting efforts you can employ right from your transportation department with little or no approval from above; and many of these ideas are likely free of charge. Banners on buses; announcements on school marquis (free); newspaper ads; Craigslist ads; attractive flyers sent home to all district parents (free); social media outreach (free); finder’s fees to current staff who bring in new drivers; job fairs and open houses at the transportation department (free); city bus shelter advertising; notices on student job boards at the local community colleges and universities (free); notices in the local water or other utility bills (free); notices at the VA and other Veterans’ establishments (free).
There you have it…in one short article; we’ve solved the decades-long school bus driver shortage dilemma.
Paul M. Novak retired from the U.S. Army in 1995 and recently retired again after 21 years as the director of transportation and school Safety for Tempe School District #3 in Arizona. He is now President and CEO of Gauge Precision Consulting LLC.
