School just started in Minnesota. One way we know this is the flutter of banners, seemingly stuck to every corner and fence post, announcing that school bus drivers are desperately needed. Join now, the signs proclaim in bold letters, and earn hiring bonuses, on-the-job training and up to $20 per hour.
This is not just a local problem.
In February, NPR reporter Robbie Feinberg documented the shortage of bus drivers in school districts across the country, leading to a shortage of drivers in the “boom economy.” Drivers have abandoned their yellow school buses for better-paying jobs, Feinberg wrote, leaving one district in Maine so short on transportation that it had to cancel classes for a day.
A 2018 article in US News and World Report also touched on the growing shortage of school bus drivers. This is a problem in rural and urban areas, Grant Schulte's article said, and has led to school closings, delayed starts and devastated communities from Hawaii to Michigan and beyond. In St. Paul, Schulte said, “some students get to school late because drivers are not familiar with the regular routes.”
But fill-in drivers are temporary workers and signal an issue deeper than the pull of a strong economy: outsourcing. Although neither Feinberg's nor Shulte's articles mentioned it, the increase in privatization programs, including the hiring of outside providers, is also a possible factor in the widespread shortage of school bus drivers.
This should raise some red flags, however, as the increasing privatization of public goods and services in the United States — a trend we see in both education and the transportation industry — is cause for concern. Privatization tends to put profits above the needs of the public, as shown in Flint water crisisfor example, or the rise of ride-sharing services such as Uber which some cities use to replace public transport options.
Workers also often do not fare well under privatization programs. A 2016 overview conducted by the anti-privatization group, In the Public Interest, argued that “privatization increases inequality” in part by reducing wages and benefits. Previously government-supported and outsourced jobs tend to lead to less stability for workers, as private employers are often driven by the goal of reducing costs, including labor costs, in order to increase profits.
A 2017 report by Onvia, a Canadian-based government procurement consultancy, argued that “outsourcing of school transportation services is one of the fastest-growing sectors in government procurement,” as famous from the transport industry group, School Bus Fleet. Onvia's conclusion was reportedly driven in part by the recognition that ongoing budget challenges for public school systems make outsourcing an attractive, ostensibly cost-cutting option.
Take a look at what happened recently in the Williamsville Central School District near Buffalo, New York. In April, a “sharply divided school board” voted to fire the district's entire team of internal bus drivers and mechanics, according Buffalo News of journalist Stephen T. Watson and replace them with services provided by a private company, Student Transportation of America.
That company already has a significant presence in the Williamsville area, Watson said, and that fact, along with the promise of $500,000 in savings, apparently convinced school board members to pull the plug on their own publicly funded, publicly managed agency. transportation. In turn, more than two dozen unionized workers lost their jobs while the district stands to “lose leverage when its transportation department is fully outsourced,” according to Watson's report.
Private transportation companies routinely promise to bus their kids for less, enticing struggling school districts with a way to ease ever-present budget shortfalls.
While the Williamson district has outsourced at least some buses for years, difficulty finding and retaining drivers led it to offer more routes to Student Transportation of America in 2005. That begs the question: How can a private company find enough bus drivers to cover routes while public schools can't? (It should be noted that, according to the online job evaluation locationsStudent Transport of America can offer more than part-time jobs with few benefits.)
Private transportation companies routinely promise to bus their kids for less, enticing struggling school districts with a way to ease ever-present budget shortfalls. Consider what happened last year in the rural Pocono Mountain School District in Pennsylvania.
There, school board members considered outsourcing transportation services to an outside, private company, over the objections of the district's school bus drivers and many supporters.
At a school board meeting in November 2018, the public turned out to express concerns about the proposal, citing a desire to retain long-term, well-known and skilled bus drivers. However, five months later, the the council voted to outsource the bus, claiming it would save millions of dollars in operating costs.
The public was quite angry, according to a report from local news source, while labor officials expressed dismay at the potential job loss from unionization for up to two hundred district employees. One of the three board members who voted against the outsourcing proposal faulted the potential sale to private bus operator First Student of the school district's fleet of buses allegedly purchased with grant money.
Doing so would amount to a loss of control, board member Annabella Lastowski he is reported to have saidas well as loss of assets.
Eventually, such moves could lead to the loss of bus drivers as well. Outsourcing School Bus Driving Jobs Can Save School Districts Money temporarilybut it could also take away benefits, job protections and wage increases from current and future drivers.
School districts across the country are struggling to build a stable pool of bus drivers, not only because Americans are moving on to better jobs, but also because there is a steady decline in funding for public institutions. This means that regions often have to tighten their belts to survive, even if that means putting more and more bus routes in the hands of private, for-profit operators.
