“At a breaking level”: St. Tammany college bus drivers complain of lagging wages, larger prices | Schooling
Kari Wichers and her husband inspect the tires, stop signs and signals on their yellow school buses before sunrise every weekday morning. At 6:15 am, she is on her way to the first bus stop to pick up a group of students with special needs – she affectionately calls them “my children” – for trips to Covington High School and Folsom Elementary.
In the afternoon she drives the same route and brings her children home safely.
Which, 61, is on her third bus. She has seen many changes since it was founded in 1993, but the past few years have been the most stressful, she said. Wichers and other drivers say they have been burdened by longer hours, rising maintenance costs and backward wages. Many drivers have quit and not enough have been hired.
In July, George Bode, St. Tammany Parish School District’s traffic director, told the school board that the district was facing a “critical shortage” of drivers and that routes needed to be consolidated. The shortage has affected schools and students: Slidell High School recently postponed its start time by 15 minutes to better accommodate transportation schedules.
The owner and operator of the school bus, Kari Wichers, is preparing to pick up the students in front of the school in Folsom, La., Wednesday, October 20, 2021. (Photo by Sophia Germer, NOLA.com, The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
“This year we have stepped up our recruiting efforts and increased our advertising, but it is still difficult to find people who have the qualifications and flexible hours required to drive a bus,” said Frank Jabbia, superintendent of the St Tammany Parish Schools.
Recruiting efforts have included expanding advertising on social media and Indeed, sending staff representatives to job fairs, and encouraging bus drivers to recruit others.
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But five more bus drivers in St. Tammany have retired or quit since August, said Meredith Mendez, a district spokeswoman. There are currently 345 bus drivers in the community, up from 376 five years ago, while the number of students has increased.
“Many more drivers will leave by the end of the year and I could be one of them,” Wichers told the school board last week.
School bus owners Fred and Kari Wichers pose before picking up children before the sunrises in Folsom, LA, Wednesday, October 20, 2021. (Photo by Sophia Germer, NOLA.com, The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
St. Tammany is not alone with the bus driver shortage. It can be felt across the country. And the National School Transportation Association found in a survey earlier this year that half of school districts described the shortage as “severe” or “desperate.”
In St. Tammany, most of the district’s 345 drivers own their buses. The owner-operator model that hooks owners up to buy and maintain the vehicles has almost entirely disappeared from the state: bus drivers estimate there are fewer than 1,000 in the state and say few are bought more buses and because of the increasing expenses.
The St. Tammany District owns 40 buses and is in the process of buying 40 more, Mendez said. Declined to say if the district owns its entire school bus fleet and would like to work with contract drivers, Mendez said the district “continues to support our bus owners / operators” and that the additions to the fleet allow them to “expand buses.” Driver options for additional people. “
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Drivers say that financial pressures are at least partly responsible for why few new drivers have come on board. In the St. Tammany School District, a bus driver’s salary starts at $ 25,850 per year for 177 work days. In addition to a salary, owner-operators receive an “operating allowance,” a state-paid number that takes into account the size of the bus, mileage, and other factors, as well as a $ 1,200 district fuel allowance and grant.
Four school taxes that grossed more than $ 100 million in St. Tammany Township when voted on November 13th
The average driver traveling about 30 miles one way on a 23-foot bus would pay $ 8,556 in operating wages.
Yale Lappin, 37, who was a St. Tammany driver for about four years, said he had to replace six tires in a year – a cost of nearly $ 5,000 – in addition to general upkeep, which is usually about half of his monthly income devours. After two major mishaps in a single month, he said, he realized he couldn’t afford it much longer.
“I was lucky if I was broke every month,” he said. He sold his bus and now works as a pipe welder for the oil and gas industry.
“We’re at a breaking point,” said Brant Osborn, president of the St. Tammany Federation of Teachers and School Employees. “Think about your job, you can’t get any more precious cargo than our parents’ children who go to these schools, so they have to have safe buses, which costs a lot of money.”
School bus owner and operator Fred Wichers checks his bus lights to make sure they’re working before it leaves to pick up students in Folsom, LA, Wednesday, October 20, 2021. (Photo by Sophia Germer, NOLA.com, The Times -Picayune | The New Orleans Attorney)
Others said they knew of drivers who lost all of their annual wages when a transmission or other costly component had to be replaced.
“There are communities that bear 100% of the transport costs, those that own buses and pay drivers, and others that contract all transport services,” says Barbara Sharp, who has been driving a car for almost 20 years. Sharp said if her bus breaks down again, it will mean retirement. “NS. Tammany isn’t doing what it has to do to keep the transport going.”
Osborn said the district could increase pay – for example through a scholarship or additional payment of gas miles – as a temporary solution until more permanent solutions can be found at the district or state level.
School bus owner and operator Fred Wichers checks his bus lights to make sure they’re working before it leaves to pick up the students in Folsom, LA, Wednesday, October 20, 2021. (Photo by Sophia Germer, NOLA.com, The Times -Picayune | The New Orleans Attorney)
Rhonda George, who has been driving a car for about 19 years, said when she first started driving, diesel fuel was $ 1.39 a gallon. Now it’s over $ 3. “They don’t care if people have one job, two jobs, or three jobs, we have to have two or three jobs to get a decent wage and a living,” she said.
“A bus driver comes out of there and we tear our asses to get the kids to school and get them from school,” George recently told the school board. “We are the first to see them, we are the last to see them when they leave, and we are not recognized for nothing.”
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