Brandon Sun - PRINT EDITION
It's getting tougher to find school bus drivers. (FILE PHOTO)
Southwest Horizon School Division is facing a desperate shortage of school bus drivers.
Operations supervisor Glynn Warnica said the division has been struggling with this issue since 2008 and this coming school year isn’t looking good.
"It’s pretty ugly actually," Warnica said. "It probably couldn’t be any worse than what we are experiencing here."
The division encompasses 12 schools including Pierson, Souris, Melita, Waskada, Hartney and Wawanesa. There are a total of 37 bus routes and there currently are nine vacancies.
"In areas like Melita, Waskada, Pierson, we don’t have enough drivers to actually cover the routes," Warnica said. "So it got to the point this year that we put a mailer in everybody’s mail box that lives down there, looking for help."
Without school bus drivers, the division has had to combine existing bus routes, which lengthens the ride time for some students to more than two hours per day.
"We had to at some points, cancel excursion trips or field trips just because we didn’t have enough drivers," Warnica said.
The division has also implemented a "finder’s fee" to encourage staff members to find candidates to take the bus driver training.
"They would get X amount of dollars for doing so, to get the people in the training course," Warnica said.
The division pays all training expenses and candidates get paid $15 per hour to take the course. Meals and travel expenses are also covered.
"It works out to $800 to $1,000 that we pay per person to be trained," Warnica said.
The job is well-paying, however it’s a part-time, split-shift position which doesn’t always appeal to many candidates.
"For the most part, it’s a job that you start at seven in the morning, you’re done at nine and then you start again at three and you’re done at five," Warnica said. "We pay between $80 and $100 a day for that amount of work, so if you’re working three hours a day, it’s $30 an hour."
Some drivers have resigned to go work for oil companies, as the same class of licence is required to drive both school buses and oil trucks.
Another snag is the fact that if someone wants to relocate to the area to take the bus driving job, Warnica said there’s nowhere for them to live.
The division has tried advertising in newspapers and on websites, but there are very few applicants.
Warnica said the division is trying to come up with some "creative" options to find a solution.
"One of the biggest things I think Southwest Horizon is doing right now is we’re combining positions," he said. "So if you want to be an (educational assistant) in the school, you can also be a bus driver."
Another option they are looking at is possibly partnering with the Western Regional Health Authority to share staff, in an effort to fill positions.
"That’s how desperate it is," Warnica said.
Meanwhile, Beautiful Plains School Division is facing a similar situation, although not as dire.
"Unfortunately, we were unable to have anybody interested in the Carberry area for training, so we still have a shortage of spare bus drivers," said Gord Olmstead, secretary-treasurer.
The division has 22 regular drivers and roughly 10 qualified spare drivers.
Olmstead said they would like to have three or four spares in the Carberry area.
"The spare drivers play a critical role in the operation of our pupil transportation system," he said.
The issue with a shortage of spare drivers is that if a driver calls in sick, there may be no one to fill in.
"If we know that there will be a leave or one of the regular drivers is going to be absent, we do everything we can from our end in order to get a driver to that route," Olmstead said. "But if there’s no spare drivers in the area and we don’t have much warning there is the potential that a route may not run."
In that case, parents may have to drive their children to school.
"We’re doing what we can … but there may be an occasion where things won’t run.
Prairie Spirit School Division, which includes 15 schools such as Baldur, Glenboro and Treherne, is also looking for more drivers.
"It’s pretty finicky, especially the spare drivers, they’re hard to retain," said Jody Parsonage, secretary-treasurer. "We have had a couple of regular drivers retire, so we are in the process of filling their positions too, so that always kind of cuts into our spare pool."
Prairie Spirit has 56 regular routes and are looking to fill two or three driver positions.
» jaustin@brandonsun.com
Republished from the Brandon Sun print edition August 13, 2012
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Southwest Horizon School Division is facing a desperate shortage of school bus drivers.
Operations supervisor Glynn Warnica said the division has been struggling with this issue since 2008 and this coming school year isn’t looking good.
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Southwest Horizon School Division is facing a desperate shortage of school bus drivers.
Operations supervisor Glynn Warnica said the division has been struggling with this issue since 2008 and this coming school year isn’t looking good.
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