Bus drivers wanted: Local schools face non-certified staffing shortages
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Finding enough bus drivers to operate all necessary routes has become a common issue for school systems across North Carolina and districts in the westernmost part of the state are not immune.
With the new school year now underway, local school systems are on the hunt for these vital employees.
Jackson County Public Schools addressed the bus driver shortage during its Aug. 27 board meeting in an effort to move toward long-term solutions. But delving into the bus driver shortage reveals a more pervasive issue — staffing shortage across all non-certified, hourly positions.
“We are currently in need of eight bus drivers, multiple nutrition staff and several custodians across the district,” said Superintendent Dana Ayers. “As a reminder, all non-certified staff are paid a minimum of $15 an hour or more based on relevant experience. I encourage anyone interested to contact our human resources department or view vacancies online.”
Over the past several years the North Carolina General Assembly has mandated increases for hourly staff in the public education system, with those employees now starting out at $15 an hour.
In Jackson County, as in several others surrounding counties, certified staff like teachers and administration are left to fill the holes when a school system cannot hire enough bus drivers.
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“I’m thankful for Ms. Jackson, the new assistant principal [at Blue Ridge School], who willingly drives a bus as do Ms. Cowen, Dr. Frizzell and several teachers,” said Ayers.
During its August meeting, Ayers told the school board that JCPS has been unsuccessful in hiring bus drivers and custodians, even with print and online postings. The school system has also disseminated flyers for parents both in English and in Spanish.
Last fall, JCPS implemented a new salary study which had been in the works for about two years. The study was focused on not just what the state requires for non-certified employees but explored what JCPS could do to acknowledge and give credit to employees who have spent several years working in the district, or have relevant experience coming in. Those employees who had been with the system for multiple years saw a boost in their hourly wage after the salary study was put in place.
School Board Member Lynn Dillard requested that the board have the conversation about bus drivers and other hourly employees and said she recognizes that there are plenty of other jobs in the area that start closer to, or above, $20 per hour.
“Why should they come and work at our cafeteria or drive our buses when they can’t make enough money?” Dillard asked, rhetorically. “If we can give the principals a $10,000 sign-on bonus, why can’t we give the nutritional staff and the bus drivers a sign-on bonus of some nice amount? And then give the people who’ve been doing those things for years and years an equal amount of money to level things out?”
In 2022, JCPS offered principals at Blue Ridge School a $10,000 sign-on bonus. Last year, the school system implemented a $3 pay differential for custodians at Blue Ridge School. Both moves were made due to the heightened difficulty of staffing Blue Ridge School. [See Blue Ridge School]
Newly elected school board member and previous county commissioner Gayle Woody noted that while people used to seek out jobs in the school system because of the benefits associated with those positions, pay in other sectors is now so much higher that even robust benefits are less of a draw.
“So many of these resorts up in Cashiers and even some of the restaurants now are paying so much more per hour and that’s money in their pocket today, they have bills today,” Woody said.
Beyond just the hourly pay issue though, Dillard recognized the inherent strains of the hourly positions within public schools.
“Those are dreadful jobs,” Dillard said. “These people get up at four o’clock in the morning and cook breakfast, then they cook lunch. And the bus drivers, my gosh, they get up at 4:30 a.m., then they come back at three and stay gone until 6 and 7 o’clock. So, I think that deserves a little bit of extra attention.”
School board member Abigail Clayton agreed with Dillard saying that she has spoken with several bus drivers from across the district that have left, many of whom say they wouldn’t come back even if they were offered more money.
“It’s not a fun job,” Clayton said. “They can go somewhere else, they don’t even care if they’re making less money, it’s just not worth it. And I don’t think that’s just our district.”
Clayton is correct. In addition to the dearth of bus drivers in Jackson County Public Schools, Haywood, Macon and Swain counties are all currently looking to fill bus driver positions.
In Macon County, Transportation and Human Resources Director Todd Gibbs said that the school system is short drivers for one and a half routes. The school system currently runs 50 bus routes.
Including regular-route bus drivers, there are a total of over 150 CDL-holding, state-endorsed drivers employed within Macon County Schools. Many of those 150 are coaches, teachers and teacher assistants who are only willing to drive activity buses for athletic events or field trips.
Of the 55 regular-route bus drivers, 11 work as custodians within the school system, three are teacher assistants and 10 are teachers.
Haywood County is currently listing nine open bus driver positions on its website.
“Our neighboring districts are experiencing the same difficulties we are,” Ayers said.
Newly appointed Chairman of the Jackson County Board of Education, Wes Jamison, asked the board what it would take to get a benchmark for the hourly rate the school system would need to offer that would make it competitive.
“A lot of our industry, such as lawn care, housekeeping, they are able to pay those folks a significantly larger amount of money than we can,” Ayers said.
But even if pay could be competitive, Ayers pointed out that working in the school system requires jumping through a few more hoops than other hourly-paid jobs. School employees like bus drivers and nutrition workers need to pass all of the necessary background checks and get fingerprinted.
“I don’t want to devalue the fact that some employers don’t have to do all the things that we have to do,” said Ayers.
School board member Kim Moore noted that with the experience and qualifications required to be a school nutrition worker, someone could probably manage a restaurant and make significantly more money.
“I’ve tried to recruit, but most people in restaurants under the manager, they don’t have to pass a drug test, only the managers,” Moore said.
As is often the case when discussing the need for bus drivers and other hourly positions, the school board’s conversation eventually turned to the question of student labor — many baby boomers might remember the days when high school students drove busses — both in the form of Southwestern Community College students, and those from high school grades within the district.
“At SCC they have a culinary program and I’m sure they would be delighted to have internships for those students,” Dillard said.
And Moore said the board should look into “student-led jobs, like allowing students to make money that are over 16, cleaning the school up after school, helping with the cafeteria where needed.”
However, Ayers pointed out that due to cleaning materials used by custodians and in the cafeteria, OSHA requires employees to be over the age of 18. Same goes for the bus driver situation. In North Carolina, anyone seeking a Commercial Driver’s License — needed to operate a school bus — has to be 18 years old.
While the board brainstormed several ways to mitigate the issue of bus driver and other hourly employee shortages, it kept coming back to the one underlying piece that the school board ultimately has minimal control and one that holds that holds everything hostage — money.
“I went to the county commissioners and my budget ask was over $13 million and we were given $10 million,” Ayers said. “That’s not fluff money, that’s money to cover salaries and the continued part of our salary scale implementation over time.”
Even a one-time expense like a sign-on bonus, touted by several board members, would need to be paid for through local funds.
“We’re going to be going back to the county commissioners later in the fall to ask for some additional funding,” Ayers said. “Currently, from the state we get and have to turn around and give out about a million dollars to charter schools. It comes to us, and then we have to pay it to charter schools. That’s a million bucks out of our pocket that we have to pass along to schools not within JCPS but those that are not affiliated with JCPS.”
The state requires that for every student residing in a certain county who chooses to attend a charter school rather than a school in the public school district, the amount of state funding allotted per capita follows that student to the charter school it attends. So even in the case of Jackson resident students attending a charter school in a different county, JCPS pays that per capita funding to the school in question.
“I don’t think any of us disagree that we would love to pay these folks more,” said Clayton. “But where do we get that money from? Sign-on bonuses are great, but how long do they stay? That retention piece still has to be there as well.”
Woody suggested that the board consider passing a resolution that conveys to the county commission how dire the need is for additional funding to cover the vacancies.
“They loaned $2.5 million to Summit Charter School, there’s a healthy fund balance in our county,” Woody said. “I think some kind of formal resolution to the board of commissioners saying this is something that the citizens care about, we care about, and our children deserve this.”
The Jackson County Board of Education may consider a formal resolution in the coming months to request more funding for the hard to fill hourly position. In the meantime, Ayers said she will look at implementing sign on bonuses and partnering with SCC and its culinary program.
