Many candidates need a full four weeks to earn their learner’s permit and, subsequently, their commercial driver’s license.)īut when schools opened in mid-August, the district still had a severe shortage of drivers. (All new school bus drivers require some training, even if they already possess a commercial driver’s license with all endorsements. We also increased the availability of driver-training sessions, starting new cohorts of candidates as often as every Monday. Like most school systems, we held job fairs and advertised throughout the region and state. This does not include field trips, after-school events, and weekend activities.ĭuring the summer of 2021, we experienced an extreme shortage of bus drivers: 150 fewer than we needed. We employ more than 500 drivers-or I should say we attempt to employ that many drivers-to cover 1,250 routes in the morning and again in the afternoon. Like most school divisions in the United States, we have suffered over the past several years from a lack of bus drivers and staff to meet transportation needs. (Chesterfield County is a suburb of Richmond, with urban characteristics near the city, vast suburban neighborhoods, and significant rural areas in the south and west.) My district, the Chesterfield County public schools in Virginia, educates more than 64,000 students and transports at least 70 percent of them nearly 9 million miles each year. Now, we have begun to use the techniques that worked in transportation to improve hiring in other areas. But the school system I lead cracked the code and achieved 100 percent staffing in transportation this past spring. Hiring school bus drivers has been tough for years, then the pandemic made it even harder.
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