Brian Joyner and Karim Johnson, two seasoned pros in the school transportation business, find themselves in new roles but dealing with the same challenges as they joined peers across the nation working to achieve a smooth start to the new academic year.
Meanwhile, surveys released over the summer by two transportation companies shed light not only on those challenges but some of the high expectations expressed by parents nationwide.
Zūm, which serves more than 4,000 school sites with end-to-end transportation technology solutions and electric fleets, found that 84 percent of parents surveyed said the U.S. school bus system could stand to improve.
“This new survey shows that most parents are looking for increased safety and transparency on the school bus, as well as healthier, more sustainable rides for their children,” said Ritu Narayan, the company’s founder and CEO.
Meanwhile, the HopSkipDrive 2024 State of School Transportation Report found 91 percent of the 400 fleet managers surveyed said their operations are “constrained by school bus driver shortages, staying steady from 2023 and increased from 88 percent in 2022.”
Additionally, 64 percent of parents said coordinating school transportation is “the most stressful part of the back-to-school season.” (HopSkipDrive said it provides
more than 10,000 school sites in 13 states with alternative transportation options. Its employees also build software and provide advisory services that solve districts’ transportation challenges.)
The HopSkipDrive survey of 500 parents of school aged children around the country also found that 62 percent said driving their children to and from school or activities has caused them to miss work. “Among parents, more than three-quarters (79 percent) say they or their partner/spouse drive their children to and from school, and 41 percent of their schools have eliminated or reduced their children’s school bus services,” a company news release stated. “(Twenty-one) percent say transportation challenges are the biggest contributor to chronic absenteeism, more so than family decisions regarding student health.”
The Zūm survey suggests parents are searching for more flexibility, with 63 percent of them saying their kids would miss less school if “more convenient school transportation options were available.”
More than eight in 10 expressed interest in using a mobile app to stay informed of their child’s location on the school bus and would use a mobile app to “know their child’s bus arrival time, similar to tracking an Uber driver’s arrival.” In fact, the Zum survey noted that, “Out of those who don’t use the school bus to transport their children, 40 percent said they would reconsider if they could track their child’s arrival and departure.”
Neither Joyner, who was promoted to transportation director of the Union County Public Schools in North Carolina, after 16 years in the department, nor Johnson, who is in his second year as transportation director for the Stafford County (Va.) Public Schools after serving in a similar position in New York state for several years and before that as a transportation operations and routing supervisor for several school districts in South Carolina, were surprised by those results. Joyner described the driver shortage as “our biggest struggle.”
It’s not as bad as what it has been, but we’re definitely not where we need to be,” he said. He attributed an uptick in applicants and success retaining drivers to an hourly pay increase for all drivers, including a $20 minimum hourly rate in place of a previous per-semester attendance bonus. The move puts the district on a more competitive footing with surrounding districts and area bus companies.
“Each semester, they could miss up to five days excused and get the bonus, but the bonus was never guaranteed year to year depending on finances. So, I asked them, ‘Would you rather have an attendance bonus or an increase in pay?’ The majority of drivers said, ‘We want an increase in pay,’” Joyner said. “We talked to finance and the school board and everyone agreed that we could pull off $20 an hour. Our existing drivers were making more than that, and we adjusted our whole scale.”
HopSkipDrive CEO and co-founder Joanna McFarland said her company’s annual survey “shows a continued need for inventive thinking, and a stalwart commitment to our students and parents, to work to overcome real, significant challenges like this continuing bus driver shortage.
“It shouldn’t be this hard for our hard-working educational leaders when new options are at hand,” McFarland continued. “The current state of our school transportation system demands we all work to ensure students and their families can access the same opportunities of education and school support.”
Johnson acknowledged a “marketplace for the alternative transportation providers. “As with any new emerging type technologies or systems, you got to start looking at all those pieces. It’s a balance,” he continued. “Unequivocally, the safest form of travel is the yellow school bus. Nobody will deny that. When you start trying to dial back from that, how does that look? How can you replicate what makes the yellow bus safe in that alternative transportation space? The industry is working through that because I don’t think alternative transportation is going to go away and there’s a niche for it.”
Interestingly, the two surveys revealed a gap between parents’ expectations and school leaders’ priorities on bus electrification. Eighty percent of parents in the Zūm survey expressed concern about the dangers of diesel fumes and 64 percent said they believe it’s important to convert to electric. Meanwhile, 73 percent of school leaders told HopSkipDrive that electrifying their fleet is either not very important or not important at all.
Johnson said the gap is not as stark as those numbers suggest. “I honestly think nobody in the industry disagrees on anything that benefits the health, welfare and
safety of a child. So, if it’s electric buses, propane, hydrogen fuel cell, if we get there, whatever technology that’s going to make it healthier and safer for school children, everybody is 100 percent on board,” he said.
Johnson, who oversaw the addition of five electric buses and supporting infrastructure at the Bethlehem Central School District in Delmar, New York, in 2021, said an issue is the practicality of deploying those technologies. “It’s not that simple. Now the transportation director has to put on his contractor hat, become an electrical engineer, figure out how to pay for it. In Bethlehem there was a team, not only me, but it was also the facilities director, our business official in the central office, the school board, the community. We were able to successfully deploy the project and it worked for that particular school system but the situation is different in different places,” he said, noting for a variety of reasons that none of the Stafford district’s 311 buses run on alternative fuels.
“You’ve got to look at all those pieces, and then when you start getting into the budgets, how is that sustainable? You can basically buy two (diesel) buses for one EV, and you’re struggling just to be able to buy buses for your fleet. How can you justify to your taxpayers that you’re basically buying one bus for every two?”
Joyner agreed. “We do have some propane buses, but I haven’t heard any interest at all on electrification…,” he added. “For electrification, we’d have to hire a different type of technician, and I also worry about how long is that bus going to last us.”
The HopSkipDrive poll also found 60 percent of school leaders said they’ve eliminated or reduced bus services this year, up from 40 percent last year. Joyner said the Union County district consolidated routes coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, including pulling service from gated communities. “We changed bell times up to about 20 minutes to some schools. That way allows us to go back and run quick doubles morning and afternoon, if need be,” he said. “So, we went from roughly 289 buses pre-COVID to 202 this year and added seven minivans to our fleet to help with our EC and McKinney-Vento kids.”
A New Approach
Last year’s school start was anything but smooth for the Jefferson County Public Schools in Louisville, Kentucky. Classes were delayed one week due to a “pretty catastrophic opening day… where we had routes that were way too long, a huge lack of bus drivers, and our service was pretty bad,” said Rob Fulk, the district’s chief operations officer. “We spent a year in that hell, where we had schools that were waiting two to three hours after the bell to have kids picked up. We had students going late to school. We had a very clear impetus to change, and we felt by focusing entirely on good service and good communication between our schools, our parents and our bus drivers that we could solve the problem.”
The result was a complete overhaul of the district routing plan and a procedural rewrite of how the transportation department supports schools, tracks buses and responds to issues. “There wasn’t any aspect that we didn’t change dramatically in our transportation department, including going back to geographic regions, starting a district-based routing team as opposed to using any outside vendor, and our own internal routers,” Fulk said.
“We completely changed how we did our intake, call center and communications with parents. We added significant technology to all of our buses. One of the big game changers for us was Samsara technology, which gave us several cameras on every bus that allowed us real time [access] to see where students were, what stops they got off, as well as real-time GPS on the bus that gives us exactly where it’s at, what their timing is on the route, and a whole host of other things.”
Another plus was driver input sought by Fulk, transportation director Marcus Dobbs, and their teams. “We really partnered with our bus drivers’ primary union, Teamsters Local 783, as we made changes and we would solicit a pretty significant amount of feedback,” Fulk said.
Meanwhile, the district’s communication department created a system including a call center, to receive parents’ feedback and quickly inform them of transportation changes. A crucial change was to address the need to increase driver ranks, which numbered roughly 1,100 a decade ago but ended last year at around 550.
“One of the huge issues we had last year was we were running in excess of 70 routes that were uncovered every day because of lack of drivers, which creates an extremely inefficient system,” Fulk said. “We had drivers putting in 10 hours, 11 hours a day, which is nice for a paycheck in terms of overtime, but when that’s what you do on the regular, that really burns them out. And at the time, I would say that our bus driver pay was not really competitive with some of the other industries in the city that require a CDL.”
Today, the district pays drivers a starting wage of $29 an hour, with extra pay on some routes such as an early childhood run. “We also pay them all at eight hours now and we don’t do the traditional [payment] model that a lot of districts do. If you come to us with no CDL, we train you on the CDL, and we train you on the S [endorsement]. And if you come to us with one or both of those, we’ll give you a bonus after you’ve worked with us for a certain amount of time.”
He praised the district’s human resources staff for holding targeted driver-hiring fairs that were “one-stop shops where you could get your physical done, get your dock card and go through all the steps so that it was less likely that we lost the applicant from application to their first certification class,” he said
Navigating School Start Up
Back in North Carolina, Johnson said the role of attendants or monitors on special education vehicles cannot be underestimated in the smooth delivery of transportation services.
“We talk a lot about school bus drivers, but I definitely want to put out there that attendants are definitely required and part of the team, and we sometimes forget about them,” he said. “But for transportation directors that have lots of SPED routes, you find out that not having that attendant sometimes means that bus can’t roll. Some people think that because they don’t have a CDL, they’re easier to get, but an attendant is not just someone you put on the bus. They need to be trained as much as your driver in order to support students and that’s not a fit for everybody. So, sometimes there’s a shortage of attendants, too.”
Jim Hessel, transportation director of the School District of Cameron in Wisconsin, said new transportation directors (and experienced ones, for that matter) should remember to take care of themselves, know when enough is enough and look for help when considering how to get the academic year off to a smooth start and keeping it on that path.
“The best advice I have to offer is to learn how to manage the stress of the job,” he said. “There are always problems that are going to come up, but how do you deal with them? The first step is to determine if there is even anything you can do about the problem. There are situations that are just out of our control and are not worth wasting time worrying about. You also need to resist the pressure to work on something constantly until you solve it.
He noted that sometimes the focus remains on old solutions, despite those already being ruled out. He advised taking a break or working on another project to clear one’s mind. This can be when a solution, that should have been obvious from the start, presents itself.
“Remember that you are surrounded by other school districts with personnel that are going through most of the same things you are going through. Get to know at least one or two of them and share your ideas and your problems,” Hessel advised. “Finally, I would suggest that you don’t let your job become your whole life. No matter if you are a school district’s transportation director, a bus driver, or the owner of a bus contracting company, you need to have time for yourself that has nothing to do with school buses. The same would apply to anyone in any career. You’ll be more energized and focused when you get back to work after allowing some of the clutter in your brain to escape.”
Editor’s Note: As reprinted in the October 2024 issue of School Transportation News.
Related: (Recorded Webinar) Collaboration, Cooperation & Change: Realigning Transportation to Meet Student Needs
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