Last week, the head of the American Trucking Association said U.S. military personnel returning home from combat “are ideal” candidates to become trucking industry professionals.
Bill Graves, ATA’s president and CEO, made the comment following a $10,000 donation made by Navistar in support of a truck driver recruitment program that targets the men and women of the armed forces. Code named “Drive for Jobs,” the Navistar initiative was highlighted during Truck Driver Appreciation Week.
“[Military veterans] have all the motivation and tools necessary to move successfully from the military into our industry,” Graves added.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a similar national program for recruiting school bus drivers? We could call it “Drive for Tomorrow” or “Bus for Bucks.” (The latter, of course, could be the most egregious false advertising claim ever as school bus drivers, on average, earn about $13 per hour. But more on that in a moment.)
It just so happens that Truck Driver Appreciation Week fell during “Love the Bus,” an equivalent type of celebration for school bus drivers promoted by the American School Bus Council albeit with much less money at its disposal. But I have yet to see the employee drive related to “Love the Bus” that Navistar’s program has. It might be something to think about for IC Bus, a subsidiary of Navistar and one of the founding members of ASBC, or others.
When it comes to new hires, certainly school districts would or should bend over backwards to hire service men and women to drive school buses. Retired Lt. Col. Russel L. Honore, the 2009 School Transportation News EXPO keynote speaker, said all Army personnel under his command held school bus CDLs as the vehicles are germane to troop movement. But these military personnel are also trained in logistics, so a career in routing planning and management is not out of the question.
The dirty little secret that should come as no surprise to anyone is that school bus drivers, and most of those in school transportation, are a drastically underpaid bunch. Sure, one might say, and so are teachers. Agreed. And both groups perform vital functions that help educate the nation’s children.
Teachers, at least the ones hoping to make a career out of their profession, must obtain advanced degrees. Most have grown up wanting to teach and make a difference in child education. Meanwhile, many who gravitate toward becoming school bus drivers, for example, do so out of necessity or to supplement their retirement income or for the flexible schedules so they can be home when their kids are. Not to say that they don’t also love being around students, but I would venture the guess that relatively few people as kids said, “I want to drive a school bus when I grow up,” and meant it.
This is an underlying reason behind the formation of the LED Initiative by the National Association for Pupil Transportation, to promote leadership qualities in school transportation personnel with the endgame being career advancement. However, it focuses more on providing advanced training for transportation management. Where do school bus drivers fit in, and especially new hires? Perhaps this presents a new avenue to explore.
Aside from vehicle purchases, one of the largest budgetary items for school district transportation departments is driver training, which makes sense. Yet for the plethora of job functions, from the defensive driving techniques to student behavior management to bus stop safety to routing to pre-trip and post-trip inspections, school bus drivers remain one of the lowest paid school employee. This despite hearing school administrators at the National Conference on Education on how much they value school bus drivers, that they are the first and last school representatives to see a child in the morning and at night.
Yet, where’s the money?
I do believe that most superintendents would pay school bus drivers more, if they could, just like they’d give teachers necessary pay bumps. Things just don’t work that way, especially in today’s economy. The chances that voters would, for example, approve a bond measure to give school bus drivers a pay hike is about as likely as a tea party being thrown at Nancy Pelosi’s house. Something has to give, and no politician or superintendent that matter can make sacrifices in the classroom.
So where does that leave transportation? In short, hiring new drivers is made even more difficult when overall budgets are being slashed and routes are being reduced or cut altogether. But now more than ever could be the best time for the industry to begin working toward a nationalized process of identifying school bus driver candidates, similar to the Navistar program for ATA.
Consider the options amid a recent American School Bus Council drive to get U.S. House and Senate members to sign a letter to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood asking the Department of Transportation to increase school bus ridership. Yellow buses, after all, are not only the safest alternative for children to get to and from school, but buses remove more cars off the street, at least in theory, hence saving fuel costs and reducing emissions.
But in that same vein, we mustn’t forget the drivers to get them to and from school. Even with rampant unemployment nationwide, slowly but surely more and more schools are experiencing a harder time in filling vacant school bus driver positions. While it remains a pipe dream that the feds would come through with $5 million over two years to promote an increase in school bus ridership, it’s time once again to at least start rethinking how the industry attracts new drivers who could become tomorrow’s leaders.
Update: Later today after posting the above blog, I read this story from ABC.com. Is this cutting out more work for Navistar and, potentially as highlighted above, the school transportation industry?
