Drivers Licenses

School Districts Across U.S. Work To Entice Bus Drivers Amid Shortage

School districts across the U.S. aren’t just dealing with teacher deficits in the classroom; they’re also needing to fill bus driver seats.

In the Houston, Texas area, it’s a competition with limited resources to find qualified drivers who will stick around for the long haul.

For many kids, school starts with the bus, and a video by the Houston Independent School District is designed to get more people to get behind the wheel.

But in Houston and elsewhere in the U.S., a bus driver shortage is presenting a bumpy road to the start of the school year.

In Houston, there was a $2,000 bonus for new drivers. Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District, northwest of Houston, has 69 open bus driver jobs.

In Pearland, Texas, south of the city, there are 23 open bus driver spots with more competitive wages and benefits, but they’re hopeful they can fill those positions after trainees qualify in October.

“But with regards to school districts, we find ourselves competing for the same pool of people all the time,” said Sundie Dahlkamp, Pearland Independent School District HR executive director. “We raise our starting salary, our neighboring districts raise their starting salary, and we tend to battle over the same individuals.”

In suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the bonus is $4,000 from the lower Merion School District. In the Eureka Union School District near Sacramento, California, the bonus is $10,000.

“This is an ongoing issue that has plagued school systems like ours and schools systems across the state and across the country, really for the last year or so,” said Bob Mosier, spokesman for Anne Arundel Public Schools in Maryland, where there were 64 vacancies. Mosier says part of the problem is that people are finding better paying jobs elsewhere.

“We are losing drivers at our other school systems to places like Walmart and Amazon, who are offering more lucrative packages for their services,” Mosier said. “That’s an issue we’ve been dealing with.”

The pandemic also prompted some older drivers to retire, contributing to the shortage.

Getting commercial drivers licenses for their replacements has also become an issue in some places.

“There’s a huge backlog for that training and that testing, so that’s that’s holding up if there are candidates,” said Dr. David Bowlin, director of field services and transportation for the Ohio Department of Education.

A recently released Rand Corporation Report found 30% of school districts surveyed raised bus driver pay this year.

A quarter of school districts enlisted staff to add bus driving to their regular duties.

In Ohio, some districts are requiring students who live close to school — within two miles — to find their own way to class.

In Fort Myers, Florida, Shonta Mcleod Stewart has been driving a school bus for the Lee County school district for 16 years. At first, she was reluctant to take the job.

“I had a bus driver that encouraged me to drive,” Stewart said. “He was like, ‘You would like it.’ I was like, ‘No, it’s a big bus. I can’t do it.'”

It turns out, she likes it.

“We are responsible to get these children to and from school,” Stewart said. “It’s a very responsible job. You have to be attentive, and you have to follow the rules. Safety is the main key.”

: newsy.com

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Truck Drivers’ On-the-Job Training Can Be Costly if They Quit

Once they have earned the license, drivers haul actual loads for their new employers. For typically four to 12 weeks, they are accompanied by a trainer. They earn a set weekly rate, varying by company but often $500 to $800, according to company websites. Mr. England said his company’s pay was $560 a week in 2019 and about $784 today.

Trainers may be barely trained themselves, often needing only six months’ experience, and they are allowed to sleep in the back while the new driver is alone in the cab, according to industry experts and many companies.

Ms. Jeschke said she finished her training without being able to back up, a crucial skill for truckers. She said she once spent a week at a truck stop, unpaid, waiting for another driver because she didn’t yet have the expertise to pick up a load on her own.

Frustrated with the working conditions and the low pay, she and Ms. Skamser left C.R. England before their contracts were up and went to work for another trucking company, Werner Enterprises, where they say they were more fully trained.

“I do not have words for how bad it was,” Ms. Jeschke said. “They do not care about drivers, only the loads.”

Ms. Skamser said a debt collection agency was pursuing her for $6,000 that C.R. England says she owes for her training.

It’s reasonable for companies to want to recoup the cost of training an individual, said Stewart J. Schwab, a professor at Cornell Law School. Still, he noted, like noncompete clauses, these contracts can significantly restrict worker mobility and hinder competition. In 2021, Mr. Schwab worked on a proposed law about restrictive employment agreements, such as the ones trucking companies use, with the Uniform Law Commission, a nonpartisan organization that drafts laws for states.

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How Identity Thieves Took My Wife for a Ride

Insurance companies routinely check your credit when signing you up, so it was baffling that Progressive would have issued my wife a policy without her thawing her file. But it listed TransUnion as “the financial responsibility vendor” — an amusing euphemism if you know how long consumer advocates have been complaining because insurance companies use credit data to set rates — and sure enough, my wife’s frozen credit file indicated that Progressive had pinged it this month.

How? Incredibly, an exception often allows insurance companies to check your credit even if you want nothing to do with them. As we learned, that exception meant that Progressive could help itself to my wife’s file — which in turn helped someone pick the pocket of the State of New York and its taxpayers, like us.

In its wisdom, Progressive considered my wife responsible enough to warrant coverage. Fortunately for us, Mr. Pasternak was paying! The second page of our welcome packet said that “the authorization you gave for your first installment payment” was to come from a bank account with his name on it.

So meet our new best friend. With a name like Shiran Pasternak, he was a quick internet search away. Was he the thief? We wondered. But if he was, he was doing a pretty good job of hiding it. Like my wife, he had a “Welcome to Progressive” package and notes from the state about a mysterious unemployment claim that he had never filed. (The bank account and routing numbers in his Progressive packet were identical to ours, but neither had any connection to institutions where any of us do our financial business. Because the numbers were truncated, it was impossible to figure out if they came from a third person or were made up.)

Once we put all of that together, Mr. Pasternak — coincidentally a former New York Times employee — breathed a sigh of partial relief up in Irvington, N.Y., and let me push forward finding out what had happened to all of us.

Here’s how it works.

Automobile insurers — even the ones you don’t use — already know a lot about you. They share claims information among themselves to help weed out unprofitable or reckless customers who try to jump to another provider. They can also get access to your driver’s license number, your current auto policy data, and the make and model of your vehicle. Often, they buy this information from states (which end up sending money right back out when the buyers are careless and unemployment fraud proliferates).

The insurers want to make applying for a policy as easy as possible. So once you start entering information, they like to help you along and fill in some of those blanks for you. For some unfortunate victims, it was as simple for the scammers as copying down the driver’s license number that popped up, although it usually required more technical know-how.

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