“So they got to take care of their family …. “I think a lot of people who were bus drivers, longtime bus drivers, they saw that situation, and, you know, like everybody else, they got to put food on the table, and they got to pay the light bills, just like everybody else,” Hamilton said in a recent interview. Tom Hamilton, STAM’s executive director, also thinks the unpredictability of the current school year played a role in the problem.Ĭompanies did not know when schools would reopen - if they did at all - this year, he said. “I think out of the eight recruiters, we had seven applicants.” “We had eight recruiters,” he said while discussing the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the industry. The whole process can take two to three months to complete, he added.Įven with high unemployment last year, some employers had difficulty enticing new employees due, in part, to the extra $600 weekly unemployment benefit provided to people out of work, John McCarthy, CEO of North Reading-based NRT Bus Inc., said last fall. “And when you do that, you’ve got to get somebody to come in the door and be interested in driving, and then you’ve got to put them through the training, especially if they’re not already licensed.” “A lot of us have been reaching out, trying to find more drivers,” Strong said. “But there were several that just said, ‘No, you’re not running the buses, we’re not paying anything.'”ĭrivers were laid off or sought other jobs to make ends meet, potentially spurred by personal COVID-19 health vulnerabilities or concerns, according to Strong, who also cites commercial trucking such as Amazon delivery as another draw from the industry’s hiring pool. “Most of the cities and towns and districts understood the need for people to still have cash flow and they continue to pay, if not 100 percent, at least a reasonable, negotiated number,” Strong said. The state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education encouraged districts to keep the payments steady to the companies, too.
#SCHOOL BUS DRIVER SHORTAGE DRIVERS#
Many continued to pay their drivers for as long as they could, Strong said.
#SCHOOL BUS DRIVER SHORTAGE HOW TO#
The longer schools were closed, the more transportation providers had to consider how to keep their businesses afloat. “It just created a situation that took a difficult situation and turned it into an impossible situation.” “No question about (it): The pandemic just changed everything,” Strong told.
‘No question about (it): The pandemic just changed everything’Ī driver shortage has been sizzling for years, according to David Strong, president of STAM, a nonprofit trade association that represents school transportation providers across the commonwealth.īut when schools closed their doors and went online last year, as the health crisis hit the United States, what was once a pesky issue reached a boiling point.
“We have explored numerous alternatives, evaluated multiple options, all of which have not yielded a substantive, comprehensive, reliable, and safe means for transporting our students.” “I want to underscore that in an effort to meet every student’s transportation needs, we have left no stone unturned,” he said, during the April 8 committee meeting.
Tutwiler said bus service has been suspended for another month until May 12. Middle and high school students are slated to return in May. Lynn schools reopened classrooms for students with prioritized needs in February, followed by kindergarten and grades one through five. The drop in revenue has spurred business-threatening financial hurdles for bus operators around the commonwealth, the lawsuit says. NRT was able to reach agreements with most other districts it works with during the pandemic but not all. The district is also the defendant in a lawsuit filed last week by its transportation provider, North Reading Transportation, which claims Lynn schools have not paid the company since March 2020, The Daily Item reports. Schools in Springfield and Framingham have also reportedly faced driver shortages this year.Īccording to Tutwiler, Lynn schools, which rely on a private company for transportation needs, only have 18 bus drivers available - enough to bring 680 students to school during its phased-in reopening this spring - roughly 60 percent of the students who regularly take the bus. The industry, built heavily around independent companies who contract their services to local schools, was hard hit by the initial shutdown of brick-and-mortar schools during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The School Transportation Association of Massachusetts estimates there are approximately 1,200 vacant driver’s seats to date across the state.
0 kommentar(er)
