As the school year begins, Forsyth County is once again dealing with bus driver shortages. After nearly fifty vacancies at the start of last year, the district stepped up its recruitment and training, but the continued shortages are a hassle for parents and students.
Every school day in Forsyth County, bus drivers move some 30,000 students nearly 40,000 miles. School system spokesman Theo Helm says this year, recruiting enough drivers to meet that demand has been tough.
"We are still at about fifteen or twenty vacancies, which is fifteen or twenty more than we'd like to have obviously," says Helm. "And where it really shows itself to parents is that we have routes that need to be split up and combined with other routes."
That route splitting often leads to delays and headaches for the WS/FC families that rely on school bus transportation.
The cause for the bus driver drought? At the local level, the biggest factors are department morale, lack of benefits, and money. Starting pay for part-time and substitute school bus drivers in Forsyth County is just $12.94 an hour.
But another major predictor for bus driver shortages can be found at the state and national level. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, driver vacancies are typically at their highest when unemployment rates are low. July's unemployment rate in Forsyth County was just 4.8 percent.
Helm says that they are working hard to reverse that trend and fill the driver vacancies as soon as possible.
“We've done more advertising including a billboard on US 52. We also are trying to get more people trained –that can be a somewhat lengthy process. We have a class going right now, bus drivers in training, which we're hoping will have them driving for us soon after that."