Some public school bus drivers made sure their voices were heard in front of the entire school board, with several drivers pushing for a raise and listing reasons why.
“This is a functioning, dysfunctional system,” said Kori Nazario, a current school bus driver for Virginia Beach Public Schools.
Drivers said they are often doubling up and doing second runs on a regular basis due to a critical shortage of drivers, yet they are not seeing it pay off in their checks.
“We’re exhausted and our morale is low,” said Terri White, another school bus driver.
“Just a couple of days ago, 90 drivers were out,” Nazario added.
According to the school district, a starting driver makes $13.68 per hour.
A driver who asked News 3 to protect her identity provided a time and mileage sheet. She said she gets paid for six hours, but the sheet shows she was on the bus for seven.
Others argue that their experience does not help their pay check as much as it should.
“I make $14.30 an hour, that means my 10 years of experience is worth only 77 cents per hour,” said Donna Larson, also a current driver.
Drivers say the pay is not an incentive to bring in the new drivers they need. Their biggest concern is that it is impacting the students.
“We’re failing, we don’t have enough drivers to do it properly,” White said.
A spokeswoman for Virginia Beach Public Schools said the majority of their full-time positions are filled, but they are always seeking substitute drivers to fill in when they have absences or people call out sick.
“On any given day, there are bound to be people out sick and on leave,” the spokeswoman said.
They currently have 620 drivers with assigned runs.
The Baltimore school system and a contracted bus company could be open to legal liability if they were aware of the driving and medical history of the driver involved in last month’s deadly crash that killed six people including the school bus driver.
Preliminary findings of a National Transportation Safety Board incident report show the school bus driver previously had “seizure-like episodes” and was involved in at least 12 crashes in the past five years.
Glenn Chappell’s medical history and previous crashes were among the main findings in an incident report released by the NTSB. Chappell, 67, was driving a school bus that struck the rear of a Ford Mustang and a wall before the head-on collision with a Maryland Transit Administration bus on Frederick Avenue on Nov. 1. Chappell was killed as were the metro bus driver and four passengers. Eleven transit riders were injured.
“The driver never should have been in any position where he was driving a school bus,” said Kevin Goldberg, a local attorney who handles accident cases.
First Student has avoided a bus strike in New Hampshire after the school bus company reached an agreement with drivers.
The union representing drivers accepted a five-year the First Student contract, the drivers voting 33-1 in favor of ratifying it. They are now prepared to return to work.
The union had authorized a strike last month after rejecting a contract offer from First Student. Drivers had been without a contract since June.
The strike would have affected schools through the New Hampshire area.
First Student said it’s happy to have the matter resolved.
North Carolina police reported that a 5-year-old girl was severely injured after a motorist drove past a stopped school bus.
Sgt. Jake Katzenberger of the North Carolina Highway Patrol said the student was struck Thursday afternoon on North Carolina Highway 210 as she was getting of the school bus. The bus’ stop arm was out and lights were flashing when the incident occurred.
Katzenberger added the driver, 24-year-old Aaron Bruce, attempted to stop, but skidded about 100 feet before his truck struck the girl.
Bruce was arrested and charged with failure to stop for a school bus while discharging students. It’s unclear if he has an attorney.
Katzenberger said the girl sustained severe injuries, yet they were not believed to be life-threatening.
Durham School Services CEO David A. Duke promised multi-million dollar technology and safety upgrades to the bus company’s national fleet operations in response to the fatal Chattanooga, Tennessee bus crash last month, as well as nationwide for the 1 million schoolchildren the contractor serves.
The company has been under fire for a perceived lack of public response to specifics surrounding the Nov. 21 incident , when a Durham bus driver lost control of his speeding school bus, struck a mailbox and utility pole and then flipped the bus before slamming the roof of the bus into a tree. Six students lost their lives as a result, with another dozen hospitalized with serious injuries.
Duke said the company needed time to conduct its ongoing investigation and it didn’t want to interfere with the investigation by local police and the National Transportation Safety Board. He also said Durham was attempting to be sensitive to the victim’s families as well as the greater community.
Durham is implementing a secure nationwide and cloud-based complaint management system for teachers and administrators to directly report any issues they have with the company’s specific routes and drivers, and to allow Durham to take immediate action. The system is already online in Chattanooga, and the rest of the company’s operations will be fully functional over the next year.
The contractor is also installing DriveCam video systems in all 16,000 buses nationwide to record the bus driver and the road each time an incident of unusual driving is flagged. Duke said Chattanooga buses will have DriveCams by the end of this year, and all Durham buses will have the systems installed with two years.
Durham is also creating the position of chief safety and data compliance officer in place by end of the first quarter of 2017 to work with the company’s senior Vice President of safety and reporting Duke to “continuously review data to identify potential issues before the become actual issues.”
