The School Bus Saga 2022
School busses line up for dismissal. Chayse Nixon/Eagle Talon
A golden light began to rise in the sky as it cast its brightness over the streets. It was early morning as cars were out and about on the roads heading to their job and buses were heading to their stops to pick up students. Under this sunrise was a group of students waiting to be picked up by their bus to be taken to school. Their anxious eyes darted everywhere, and false hope was given each time a yellow-orange school bus passed them. Each minute that went by, no bus had stopped to pick them up and the time was getting closer to when they should have arrived at school.
A shortage of bus drivers has become a major problem throughout many different school districts as students do not know when they are going to get to school or arrive home. They could either arrive at school minutes after first period has begun, missing important things in their class, or not get home till six or seven, unable to complete homework in a timely and healthy manner.
“Sometimes the bus won’t come at all which is difficult, so I have to call my friends or my grandparents to pick me up,” sophomore Yasmine Colon says, “And sometimes they can’t pick me up.”
Due to buses not arriving at all, some students must get onto other buses which causes them to become full beyond capacity.
“The sub buses come really early or late, and the buses are very crowded,” Colon added.
Bus drivers simply are not getting enough pay. In addition, some drivers who do double routes are not getting paid for the extra routes they do. For example, the hourly pay for bus drivers in Jacksonville is around $13-21 which rounds to about $27k-43k a year according to PayScale. Their pay does not represent the long hours they spend on the road and the poor conditions that they work in.
“Our bus drivers are struggling to start with,” Henry Sanchez, a bus driver from Grand Rapids, Michigan, said in an interview with NEA News. “The pay isn’t good enough to keep people or hire new drivers. If you have a job that keeps you in poverty, it’s not a good job.”
Editorial Cartoon. Leila Musah / EagleTalon
The fault could also be with the students and how they behave on the bus. Some bus drivers do not know how to deal with disrespectful kids which could lead them to quit.
There are many factors that correlate to the reason why there is a shortage of bus drivers: Not enough pay, COVID-19, students not behaving well, etc. While these are familiar factors, respect and time may be the only things that could help.
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