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School districts face driving dilemmas with bus fleet
By Rachel Pleasant
Staff Writer
Think your job is hard? Try driving hordes of shrieking children to and from school every day in a bus with no air conditioning and earning a few dollars an hour for your trouble.
Or better yet, try being the person in charge of recruiting bus drivers.
“There just aren’t a whole lot of people beating down the doors to be bus drivers,” says Mac Flood, director of transportation for the Berkeley County School District.
Flood, like his counterparts at Charleston and Dorchester districts Two and Four, has the unenviable task of filling the need for bus drivers—a need that is never filled.
In demand
The Charleston area is growing at a breakneck pace, as demonstrated by the number of residential building permits being issued in the area. In 2004, 6,949 single-family building permits were approved in the region, up 29% from the year before.
A side effect of all that residential growth, school officials say, is an increase in student populations.
Total enrollment among the area’s four school districts for the 2004-2005 term was 90,418, according to the state department of education, up 2.6% from 88,169 in the 2000-2001 school year.
With increased student enrollment comes increased numbers of children who depend on buses to get to and from school every day.
According to the state Department of Education, during the 2004-2005 school year, Dorchester Two and Four, Charleston and Berkeley school districts handled 49,012 bus riders, up 6% from 46,235 during the 2000-2001 school year.
The demand for bus drivers is a gnawing problem in the state, which currently employs about 5,000 bus drivers, says Doug Hamrick, assistant director for district services at the state Education Department.
“It’s a continuous process. It’s a never ending battle to recruit and retain bus drivers,” Hamrick says, adding that the turnover rate among these workers is about 15% to 20% every year.
Here in the Charleston area, as development churns away and student populations continue to increase, the need for school bus drivers is a constant concern.
“With all the job opportunities in the tri-county area, we’re way down on the list as far as people wanting to work for us,” Flood says.
Flood has enough drivers to operate his district’s 190 buses this school year, as long as none of those drivers get sick or need a day off, he says.
“We don’t have people for substitutes,” he says.
In Dorchester Two, spokeswoman Pat Raynor could not pin down an exact number of how many bus drivers are needed but says there “is a gap” in the number of drivers currently employed and the number the district needs.
“We did lose some folks over the summer. We’re not at full staff at the moment, so our substitutes will be coming in until more are recruited.”
Should a substitute bus driver not be able to make a route, Raynor says members of the transportation office staff are licensed and can drive in an emergency situation.
In Dorchester Four, there is just one driver for each of the district’s routes, says Paul Cobbs, director of transportation.
“I need five more drivers for the whole district. I don’t have any back-ups. When I’m short, the drivers pull a double route. If that’s in the morning, kids are late getting to school. If it’s in the afternoon, they’re late getting home,” he says.
In Charleston, which operates 331 buses and has approximately the same number of drivers, bus services are outsourced to a company called First Student, which is responsible for hiring drivers, spokeswoman Mary Girault says. While there is not currently a shortage, the district is always in need of bus drivers, she says.
The drivers
School bus drivers are employed by the school district, not the state, Hamrick says.
It is up to the individual districts to hire bus drivers, though the state provides each district with a base driver wage. Last school year, the state’s funding for bus drivers was $41 million. Divided among the state’s 86 school districts, the state funding allowed for a base wage of $7.96 per hour. On average, a bus driver works about five hours per day, Hamrick says.
To help in recruiting drivers, school districts usually pay something more than the state’s base.
In Dorchester Two, for example, the longer a bus driver works for the district, the more that driver will make. Drivers start at $7.97 an hour and after 30 years bring home $12.68 an hour, though Raynor says most drivers do not work that long.
In Berkeley, drivers start at $8 an hour but after 25 years of work make $13.
Charleston’s bus drivers start out at $9.25 and also make more as time passes.
Cobbs could not provide a pay scale for Dorchester District Four.
Though the districts have the authority to increase a driver’s wage, they can’t do anything about the lack of insurance benefits, Hamrick says.
To qualify for insurance benefits, state employees must work 30 hours a week. As of the 2000-2001 school year, about 25% of the state’s bus drivers qualified for insurance benefits and sick pay.
“Some of the issues the districts face in recruiting bus drivers in the Charleston, Berkeley and Dorchester area have to do with the economy around that area,” Hamrick says. “That area has fairly low unemployment and a demand for workforce. You take a bus driver who may work a little over five hours a day and a good portion don’t get insurance benefits, and it’s easy to see why the districts would be hard pressed for drivers.”
Other states have lowered the required number of hours worked to qualify for benefits, which could be an option in South Carolina and may help in recruiting drivers, Hamrick says.
Add to the low pay and lack of benefits an arduous licensing process and the prospect of manning a fleet of school buses is even more difficult, Flood says.
Potential bus drivers must take a 20-hour course, complete a minimum of
10 hours of training, pass three written tests in order to earn their commercial drivers license and pass a physical performance test. Come September, they will also have to pass a national license exam, Hamrick says.
The qualification process can take as little as two weeks but usually takes between a month and six weeks, time for which candidates are often not paid, Hamrick says.
The buses
In addition to personnel demands, growth in the Charleston region has also created a need for buses, district representatives say.
“With our growing student population, there’s an added burden. The state gives us what buses they have funding for, but we don’t get all that we need to keep up with student growth,” Raynor says.
Currently, Dorchester Two operates89 buses, including 18 for students with special needs.
Berkeley is feeling the pinch for buses as well, Flood says.
“We need more buses. We’re anticipating a lot of growth, but we can’t get additional buses until we prove we actually need them. We have to show actual numbers,” he says.
“There aren’t additional buses being bought to keep up with the growth. It’s a far bigger problem than just locally. The state Legislature needs to address this and decide if they want the bus transportation to continue as it is or do something else.”
Districts must appeal to the state in order to obtain more buses. New buses range in price from $54,395 to $69,544, depending on size, Hamrick says.
Charleston and Berkeley each received five buses from the state’s purchase of used vehicles from Kentucky earlier this year. Raynor says her district also recently received new buses from the state and is buying an additional special needs bus out of its operating budget.
The additional buses are helpful, Raynor says, but won’t eliminate development’s impact on her district’s bus system.
“This community is growing. Routes that used to take 25 minutes now take 35 to 40 minutes because of traffic,” Raynor says.
“When you have an additional 10 to15 minutes on a route, it has to be built into the schedule. We start the routes earlier. In the more rural areas, we’re picking kids up at 6:15 in the morning.”
Rachel Pleasant is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail her at rpleasant@charlestonbusiness.com.
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