The Sudbury Student Services Consortium announced Friday that there will be no cancelled school bus routes next week after a rocky back-to-school period amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the beginning of the school year, 25 school bus routes were cancelled due to a shortage of bus drivers after several quit just prior to the school year for reasons related to the pandemic.
There has been a diminishing number of routes on that list ever since as local school bus operators have had some success in bringing in and training new recruits.
Local operator Leuschen Transportation has actually increased its pay for drivers to $20 per hour.
A press release from the consortium thanked parents, schools and school boards for their patience and understanding over the last seven weeks, as well as the local media for promoting the need for new school bus drivers.
Although the consortium projects there won’t be any cancelled buses this coming week, its executive director, Renée Boucher, said local operators could still easily use 15 or 20 more drivers.
That number would be ideal as backup for drivers who can’t work because of illness, and also because it has been all hands on deck at local bus companies, with managers, mechanics and trainers pitching in and driving bus.
“If we can get these people to stay in the garage or we get the trainers to actually be able to train an entire day rather than part of the day because trainers have to go drive buses morning and then part of the afternoon, that would be best,” said Boucher.
A few bus drivers have also unfortunately quit so far this school year due to personal circumstances such as illness or deaths in the family, Boucher said.
The consortium is also still working on rearranging the seating assignments on school buses — due to the pandemic, students are required to have assigned seats on their bus.
Boucher said some parents weren’t happy with the seats assigned to their kids by the computer application used by the consortium (this application, she explained, is new, having just been released in August).
In some cases, it prevented siblings from being seated together as it attempted to preserve cohorting by grade.
Boucher said the consortium is awaiting an update of the computer application — which was supposed to be released this month — before an across-the-board re-working of bus seating assignments based solely on pickup location.
So for now, school bus drivers are working with the original seating assignments handed out at the beginning of the school year.
The consortium director said she has also received roughly five to 10 complaints from parents who say seating assignments are not being respected.
“I have to say I’ve probably had between five and 10 parents call me and say the children are not sitting in their assigned seats,” Boucher said.
“So for those particular runs I personally went in and assigned each child individually to seats, putting the siblings together, putting the stop locations as best I could, or putting the cohorts — children who are from one school — sitting them with the same grade from the same school.”
COVID-19 has meant a rough start to the school year, especially for new bus drivers, she said.
“We have new, new drivers,” Boucher said. “There are so many things that they need to consider. It’s driving the bus safely, and then following the route directions we give them, following the specific stops that we give them and worrying that they’re picking up the proper students and then dropping off the proper students.
“When they’re dropping off the students, the little JKs and SKs, we need to watch out for parents.
“There is a lot of work to be done for these drivers, and specifically new drivers. And then we tell them we need to ensure the children are sitting in their proper seats, and if you don’t, then you need to report them to schools.
“It’s not an easy job. They are working hard, and they have a lot of responsibilities.”
