About once a week a bus route for Macon County Schools is missed due to a lack of available drivers.
“We’ve hit a critical point,” MCS Personnel Director Todd Gibbs said. “We’ve been dwindling over the last five to eight years.”
While the number of available bus drivers has dropped over the last few years, the problem was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, Gibbs said.
Despite advertisements for positions, the shortage remains.
“We’ve offered face-to-face CDL bus driver classes, virtual CDL bus driver classes, reimbursing people for their CDL physical and permit fees,” Gibbs said. “We also have a paid bonus for anybody employed, paid out in December.”
A missed bus route can mean kids either don’t get to school or parents/guardians must miss work time to take kids to school. Studies suggest a lack of school bus access can lead to chronic absenteeism for students.
The shortage of drivers isn’t unique to Macon County. According to EducationNC, at the start of the 2022-23 school year, there were 1,300 bus driver vacancies in North Carolina for the 14,100 school buses that run every school day.
“It’s all across the state,” Gibbs said. “You go into Georgia, you see advertisements down there. Rabun and Banks (counties) are short.”
Going forward, Gibbs isn’t confident the bus driver shortage will be resolved due to the rising age of drivers.
“It’s an issue many employers are currently facing,” Gibbs said.
Becoming a bus driver
Driving a school bus requires a CDL license, which Gibbs said can take a couple of months to get.
“You have to sit through a three-day class, virtual or face-to-face. Then you get a CDL physical, drug screened, and have to fill out an MCS application,” Gibbs said. After getting a CDL permit, a prospective driver must hold it for 14 days before doing any behind-the-wheel bus driver training, which takes an additional three days. Then the person has to go back to the DMV to get their permitted CDL license.
One new bus driver, Tim Shaw, said the process takes even longer than that.
Shaw answered one of the many advertisements asking for drivers. “The school didn’t start until the end of September, we went to three or four days, and there’s probably about 25 people there,” Shaw said. “The problem is, once you take that class, you can go get a permit from the DMV, but that day…[the instructor] said you can apply, we all went online to see about getting into the DMV and I couldn’t get in until Dec. 22.”
Shaw said he kept going in the afternoon to the DMV in hopes of getting his CDL, finally obtaining it.
After that, Shaw had to complete two days of behind-the-wheel training, which he said is only available from one person based out of Clay County. Shaw said that the two days were spent with another prospective driver, which he felt like was a negative as it cut down on actual driving time.
“I was able to get in with her in maybe late November/first of December,” Shaw said. After those two days, he could go get his permitted CDL license, which he got on that Dec. 22 appointment he originally kept. Shaw said after that, the next appointments were in late January/early February.
Shaw said the whole process, from first application to driving a bus, took from Aug. 4, 2022, to Jan. 4, 2023, five months.
Shaw said many of his bus driving classmates were teachers, some who tried to recruit fellow teachers to join them.
Despite the hurdles, Shaw said becoming a bus driver has been rewarding for him, but can understand the reluctance at first, saying some people are intimidated about being a school bus driver, and the lack of bus driver helpers.
Shaw said some of the unexpected rewards are the kids giving him cards thanking him for being their bus driver and gift baskets.
Anyone interested in becoming a bus driver can contact Gibbs at todd.gibbs@macon.k12.nc.us or at 828-524-3314.
“It’s a great job because we have great kids,” Gibbs said. “You get attached to the kids. It makes a difference to a kid by being a smiling face to them.”