Editorial: Pay increase could help attract bus drivers

A key element of successful schools is ensuring that students are there on time and ready to learn. That can be a difficult proposition in a school district where it is routine for school buses to be running behind schedule because there are not enough drivers.

That is what the Greenville County School District is facing. Recently, the district was 40 drivers short; that’s more than 10 percent of the full staff of 393 drivers. And that includes substitute drivers. As district spokesman Oby Lyles told The Greenville News, that lives little margin for the district to cover for sick or absent drivers.

“So you’re running on a thin margin to start with, and then you’re not fully staffed and you have a few bus drivers out sick, it creates a domino effect,” Lyles said according to the newspaper report.

It is a situation that needs to be addressed. South Carolina already struggles to graduate some of its students, particularly those in the poor, rural parts of the state that also are the areas with the greatest transportation needs. That situation should not compounded by a lack of school bus drivers. When students miss school or are late because of transportation problems, it can negatively affect them in ways that linger throughout the school year.

This the same rationale that the state Department of Education needs to take seriously in addressing its other transportation problem: the age of the state’s school bus fleet. It is the oldest fleet in the country with 1,127 of buses between 21 and 25 years old and 2,114 of them 16 to 20 years old. The Greenville County district was averaging 70 breakdowns a week earlier this school year, according to The News.

One solution to both the staffing shortage and the bus fleet’s age is simple: money.

The state needs to replace its buses faster. A state law mandates that buses be no older than 15 years old; but the state has not provided enough funding to replace the vehicles on a schedule that meets that standard.

Likewise, the school districts do not get enough funding to keep enough bus drivers on the payrolls. The obvious place to look for blame in a hiring shortage is pay. And pay for school bus drivers in South Carolina is low. For that some blame can fall on taxpayers in this state whose hackles are raised at the slightest hint of a tax increase. Starting pay for a Greenville County school bus driver is $11.68 an hour; the maximum rate is $15.48 an hour. Drivers work at least 30 hours a week. They also receive benefits that include health and dental insurance, a pension, sick leave and vacation time, according to a recent report in The Greenville News.

Without a doubt, $12 an hour is not enough to support a family. Furthermore, school bus fleets only run during the school year, further cutting the earning power of drivers.

There have been frequent attempts to change the state’s model for school buses. Right now South Carolina is the only state that has a state-run school bus fleet. Some have argued the state would be served better if that responsibility were given to the districts or privatized. The former would do little to solve the problem as individual districts would then not only have to hire drivers, they would have to buy and maintain buses, too. The latter could open the door to higher pay, but also to unions that could disrupt the day-to-day transportation of if a dispute arises.

For example, in Charleston right now the union that represents drivers is engaged in a legal battle with the private bus company. Charleston is one of just a few districts in the state that handles its own transportation, in this case through a private contractor. In January of last year, private bus drivers in two South Carolina school districts threatened to strike. Such an occurrence would be a disaster for public schools that in a best case would need to scramble to replace striking drivers.

It is essential that the state’s school districts get children to school on time to learn. That cannot be done with an inadequate fleet of buses or with an inadequate number of bus drivers. The state Legislature, the state Department of Education and the local school districts need to work together to figure out how to solve both of these problems. Taxpayers, for their part, need to realize that both issues might require them to reach a little deeper into their pockets.