While some departments in the Palm Beach County School District might have to lay off workers this summer, one department is having trouble filling crucial seats – behind the wheel of the school buses.
Can we get bodies in here to drive the bus? Yes. But we need good people, District’s Transportation General Manager Pete DiDonato said.
According to DiDonato, the district hasn’t found enough qualified applicants to fill at least 40 openings in the fall.
Most of those openings are because of older drivers retiring. Several others left for Palm Tran, the Palm Beach County bus system or to drive buses for school systems in Martin and St. Lucie counties. DiDonato said losing drivers to Palm Tran has been a problem for the district because of pay differences. Now the cost of gas has made it too expensive for some drivers who lived in the Treasure Coast to work in Palm Beach County.
We’re kind of like a farm team for Palm Tran, DiDonato said.
Senior Transportation Coordinator Johnny Milton estimated that 25 of the district’s roughly 700 bus drivers live in the Treasure Coast.
The starting pay for a Palm Beach County school bus driver is $11.77 per hour. Palm Tran drivers start at $13.67 per hour, while Martin County drivers start at $13 per hour and St. Lucie County drivers $15.09 per hour.
In past summers, the district would be flooded with applications for new drivers. But Senior Transportation Coordinator in training Valerie McClendon said applications are way down this year. She might have received 20 calls a week last summer, but she now gets four.
We’d turn on the computer before and we couldn’t even get through all the applications, DiDonato said.
Compounding the problem, McClendon said, is at least half if not more of the applicants do not meet the minimum requirements for bus drivers. Most get eliminated when background checks find criminal records or too many speeding tickets and moving violations on their record.
State and federal health requirements for bus drivers, such as minimum blood pressure and vision restrictions on drivers with certain conditions such as sleep apnea, have also become more stringent in the past several years, McClendon said.
The economy and retirements compound the problem, DiDonato said. In the past, bus driver positions were typically held by older drivers who did not depend on part-time income to support a family. With many of those drivers retiring and the weak economy, drivers who are trying to support a family have found it hard to get by on a bus driver’s salary.
Bus drivers regularly get paid six to eight hours a day for routes, and are only paid on days when children are attending school. Drivers could often supplement their income with extra routes such as field trips, DiDonato said, but money for field-trip buses has been reduced in the past several years.
Also, union rules require that work go to drivers with the most seniority, meaning that starting drivers end up with several lean years before they start picking up extra routes.
Next year’s budget proposes to eliminate 40 vacant bus driver positions and the district is looking at consolidating as many as 20 routes to save on fuel costs. But Milton estimated they will still need to hire 40 new drivers to keep the buses staffed in the fall.
DiDonato said the transportation department is trying to go on the recruitment offensive to find qualified drivers . One tactic is to park a bus at various schools, facing major streets, with a banner on it saying the district is hiring drivers.
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