Delaware schools come up short for bus drivers

• Districts all over Delaware have been struggling in recent years to attract enough bus drivers.
• The shortage has cut into class time and presented other issues.
• The Appoquinimink School District paid to have all of its drivers make practice runs of routes.

If the legions of big yellow buses taking to the roads this week run on time, there will be a collective sigh of relief from school administrators and parents across the state.

Districts all over Delaware, and across the country, have been struggling in recent years to attract enough drivers to ferry students back-and-forth to school. That shortage has led to chronic problems getting students to school on time, which cuts into class time and means that some low-income students who eat breakfast at school miss out on their first meal of the day.

For the last couple years, the first days of school in Delaware have been marred by incidents where students are not picked up or wait exceedingly long times for the bus.

"There are multiple effects and all of it negative for students," said Gregg Tulowitzky, who is in charge of student transportation issues for the state Department of Education.

The problem has become so pronounced that Appoquinimink School District spent $35,000 to have all of its drivers come in a week before the start of the school year to make practice runs and meet with administrators and the superintendent to prepare for the first day of school. It called the event Day Zero.

Every year, the district loses drivers to Amazon and Walmart, which entices drivers with the promise of earning $82,000 annually, said T.J. Vari, assistant superintendent for operations at Appoquinimink.

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"We don't want them to say, 'I'm not showing up today because I got a job at Wal-Mart,' " Vari said, explaining that it is hard to compete with salaries like that compared to the roughly $14 per hour that school bus drivers make, even though they are required to have a special driver's license and pass comprehensive background checks. So part of the idea behind Day Zero is to combat the appeal of higher salaries with allegiance to the schools.

The price tag for the effort is significant, he said, but, "people move here for education – we've got to get them to school."

The idea for Day Zero came out of a special committee created last year to address transportation problems in the district, which had come to a head when several routes were without a driver more than once a week and, at one point, a high school team had to forfeit a game because they didn't have a bus, Vari said.

Like most districts in Delaware, Appoquinimink contracts with school transportation companies that own and maintain the buses and hire the drivers. So, the drivers aren't actually employees of the district.

Regardless of whether it is contractors or districts doing the recruiting, it's hard to find drivers.

Brandywine is the only school district in the state that owns its own fleet of buses and hires its own drivers.

"We still run short of drivers," said Rob Harding, supervisor of transportation. "Last year was horrendous."

Brandywine was short by about 10 drivers at the start of last year. It's about six drivers short going into this year, Harding said.

He manages shortages by juggling drivers between the district's three staggered routes for elementary, middle and high school levels.

"We've been able to keep lateness to a minimum," he said – part of that is because they have a lot of experience in the department and part of that is because they made some unpopular changes in order to make routes more efficient.

A little over five years ago, Brandywine buses stopped going into developments, he said – a change that wasn't welcomed by parents. Students now walk from their homes out to the front of their development and wait in a cluster for the bus to pick them up all at once, unless it's a particularly deep development that would require kids to walk a significant distance.

"It was painful," he said, guessing that the department fielded thousands of angry phone calls that year.

While Appoquinimink still sends buses into housing developments, it has made the move to consolidate some of its routes, which makes for longer bus rides, but has the payoff of requiring fewer drivers. It's a matter of weighing the longer ride against more consistent service, Vari said.

That change was the recommendation of a consultant the district hired last year to help ease some its transportation woes.

No part of the state is immune to the shortage – Indian River School District in Sussex County has the biggest geographic area to cover of any district in the state, 365 square miles, said Tyler Bryan, who is in charge of transportation.

"It was looking very, very bleak for us at the end of last year," he said.

Part of what Indian River is facing is a change in the industry in that part of the state – it used to be common for a person to own a bus and contract with the school as an independent driver. The district now works with 38 different contractors, 26 of whom own their own bus and drive as a side job.

Although there are varying factors that contribute to the shortage, everyone agrees – from districts across the state to a national organization that represents the industry, the National School Transportation Association – that driver shortages generally reflect the state of the economy. When it's in a slump, qualified people are willing to take a part-time job. When the economy is strong, they're not.

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That's been true for the last 20 years, according to Ronna Sable Weber, executive director of the NSTA.

"When the economy's bad, we don't have a problem getting bus drivers," Harding said. "But, the economy isn't bad right now."

Those in the industry across Delaware also agree that the state funding formula – which, essentially, covers 90 percent of the cost of buying, maintaining and driving the buses – is in need of an overhaul because it doesn't provide enough funding for salaries that would attract drivers with the qualifications to drive the buses.

When there is a shortage, it takes a toll not just on students' education, but also on parents.

"I understand people get sick," said Carla Belcher, who has two children in the Appoquinimink School District, but having a bus come significantly late twice a week means that she and her husband have to routinely go into work late.

"Being a household where both parents work, it really threw a wrench in our plans," she said.

Change may be on the horizon, though.

This year saw a 3 percent increase in the amount given to districts for transportation, which is the biggest increase in the last decade, said Tulowitzky, who will be working with districts and contractors to make recommendations to the Legislature for budget increases in 2018.

"So, there's hopefully light at the end of the tunnel with this," he said.

Contact Saranac Hale Spencer at (302) 324-2909, sspencer@delawareonline.com or on Twitter @SSpencerTNJ.