This story by Liberty Darr was first published in the Other Paper on August 15.
It’s likely that the South Burlington School District will start this school year the same way it ended last year: short on bus drivers.
When Jean-Marie Clark started her job as the director of operations for the district in June, she was told most of her day would be dedicated to addressing the bus driver shortage that has remained one of the top pressing concerns for parents and district officials.
But now, she says, the feat of filling the driver seats dominates roughly 90 percent of her daily tasks since the district is in worse shape than last year, with only a dozen drivers currently on hand. That’s down at least three employees from the previous year, she said.
As a last-ditch effort, the school board approved significant pay increases for drivers at its meeting earlier this month.
“The board and our committee have identified bus drivers and the shortage and our — quite frankly — inability to get students to and from school consistently as our greatest operational need,” superintendent Violet Nichols said at the meeting. “This is also, again speaking to the figures here, our greatest area of shortage, from a staffing perspective, the category with the highest number of open requisitions. Again, we know that this is a trend that is consistent in our county, in our state, and the country.”
Now, a driver who is actively seeking a commercial driver’s license will be making roughly $33 per hour. For a driver with up to a year of experience in the district, that is bumped up to roughly $35 per hour. For those with up to 20 years of experience, it’s $39 per hour, and $42 per hour for those with over 20 years of experience. The district has also implemented a referral bonus of $1,000.
The new agreement eliminates the yearly 15-step salary model that the district had outlined for fiscal year 2025. Starting wages are now equivalent to what drivers would have been making at the highest step in the previous salary model.
“We’ve tried all the things, and really increasing the pay felt like the very last lever we had to use,” Clark said. “We just were not in the same market as our neighbors. How can you blame a bus driver who can do a route in South Burlington, versus some of the neighboring school districts and make a significant amount more?”
The school district’s senior director of operations and finance, Tim Jarvis, explained that he designed the new model by comparing neighboring district’s salary schedules. For example, he said, a driver at South Burlington School District would have to reach the seventh year in the previous model to hit the lowest base pay at Champlain Valley School District.
“We’re competing against Champlain Valley Union,” he said. “CVU has a unique approach to how they compensate bus drivers. We feel very confident that our full compensation package, including benefits, is extremely competitive, but our base salaries are not.”
In addition to working to boost morale in the bus garage among the district’s current staff, Clark said she has spent a massive amount of time doing outreach for any potential new applicants. In some of her first weeks on the job, she went through all of the driver applications the district received in years past and reached out to each of them.
“I just started calling them all like, ‘Hey we’re hiring for drivers. You were interested in 2021. Are you interested now?’” she said.
Still, that effort didn’t garner much traction.
As a short-term cost-saving solution, Clark is also exploring partnerships with outside companies like First Student that the district may be able to temporarily contract with to provide drivers until the employee roster is up to capacity.
But that remains uncertain and, until then, the rolling route cancellations the district has been implementing since last year will likely continue.
Last lever
This problem is just one piece of the puzzle for the district as the city expands to a more urban environment. As driver shortages are expected to continue, the district has been working closely with the city to provide safe alternative ways for kids to walk or bike to school.
Since most of the city’s schools are in the heart of City Center on busy roads like Dorset Street and Market Street, the superintendent and school board have collaborated over the last year with the city to establish school zones and other traffic mediation efforts in front of all its schools.
Clark is also a member of a newly established Safe Routes to School task force charged with finding and implementing some of these solutions.
An initial pilot project approved by the city council in June outlines a new “neighborhood greenway” that would lead from the intersection of U.S. Route 2 and Elsom Parkway through the Prouty Parkway and O’Brien Drive neighborhoods to the school grounds.
The path would include several provisional infrastructural changes including signs, temporary chalk paint, bump-outs and other items to create more awareness for people driving vehicles.
“We have really tried to alleviate transportation from all the levers possible, through our partnership with the city through Safe Routes to School, through partnership with the city with the implementation of school zones, and really trying to increase alternate ways of getting to and from school,” superintendent Nichols said.
