woodleywonderworks
School has just started in Minnesota; one way we know this is the flutter of banners, seemingly tacked up on every corner and fence post, announcing that school bus drivers are desperately needed. Sign up now, signs proclaim in bold block letters, and earn a hiring bonus, on-the-job training, and up to $20 per hour.
This is not just a local problem.
In February, NPR reporter Robbie Feinberg documented the bus driver shortage in school districts across the country, chalking the lack of drivers up to the “booming economy.” Drivers have abandoned their yellow school buses for better paying jobs, Feinberg wrote, leaving a district in Maine so transportation-strapped that it had to cancel classes for a day.
A 2018 article in U.S. News and World Report also touched on the increasing lack of school bus drivers. This is a problem in rural and urban districts, the article by Grant Schulte reported, and has led to school closures, late starts, and frazzled communities from Hawaii to Michigan and beyond. In St. Paul, Schulte said, “some students are arriving late to school because fill-in drivers aren't familiar with the normal routes.”
But fill-in drivers are temporary workers, and signal an issue deeper than the pull of a strong economy: outsourcing. Although neither Feinberg nor Shulte’s articles mentioned it, the ramping up of privatization schemes, including hiring outside providers, is also a likely factor in the widespread shortage of school bus drivers.
This should raise a few red flags, however, as the growing privatization of public goods and services in the United States—a trend we see in both education and the transportation industry—is cause for concern. Privatization tends to put profits before the needs of the public, as seen in the Flint water crisis, for example, or the rise of ride-sharing services such as Uber that some cities are using to replace public transportation options.
Workers, too, often don’t fare well under privatization schemes. A 2016 survey conducted by the anti-privatization group, In the Public Interest, argued that “privatization increases inequality” partly through a decline in wages and benefits. Previously government-backed jobs that get outsourced tend to result in less stability for workers, as private employers often lead the goal of cutting costs, including labor costs, in order to increase profits.
A 2017 report from Onvia, a government contract advisory firm based in Canada, argued that the “outsourcing of school transportation service is one of the fastest-growing areas in government contracting,” as noted by the transportation industry group, School Bus Fleet. Onvia’s conclusion was reportedly driven in part by a recognition that ongoing budget challenges for public school systems make the outsourcing of services an attractive, ostensibly cost-cutting option.
Take a look at what happened recently in the Williamsville Central School District near Buffalo, New York. In April, a “sharply divided school board” voted to lay off the district’s entire team of in-house bus drivers and mechanics, according to Buffalo News reporter Stephen T. Watson, and replace them with services provided by a private company, Student Transportation of America.
This firm already has a substantial foothold in the Williamsville district, Watson reported, and that fact, as well as the promise of saving $500,000, apparently convinced school board members to pull the plug on their own, publicly funded, publicly managed transportation services. In turn, more than two dozen unionized workers lost their jobs while the district stands to “lose leverage once its transportation department is fully outsourced,” per Watson’s report.
Private transportation companies typically promise to bus kids for less, thereby tempting struggling school districts with a way to mitigate ever-present budget shortfalls.
While the Williamson district has been outsourcing at least some busing for years, the difficulty of finding and keeping drivers led it to offer more routes to Student Transportation of America in 2005. This begs the question: How can a private company get enough bus drivers to cover routes while public school districts can not? (It should be noted that, according to online job review sites, Student Transportation of America may be offering little more than part-time positions with few benefits.)
Private transportation companies typically promise to bus kids for less, thereby tempting struggling school districts with a way to mitigate ever-present budget shortfalls. Consider what happened last year in the rural Pocono Mountain School District in Pennsylvania.
There, school board members contemplated shifting transportation services to an outside, private firm, over the objections of the district’s own school bus drivers and a multitude of supporters.
At a school board meeting in November 2018, the public turned out to voice concerns over the proposal, citing a desire to retain long-term, well-known, and skilled bus drivers. Still, five months later, the board voted to outsource busing, claiming it would save millions of dollars in operating costs.
The public was quite angry, according to a write-up from a local news source, while labor officials expressed dismay over the potential loss of unionized jobs for up to two hundred current district employees. One of the three board members who voted against the proposal to outsource decried the potential sale to the private busing provider, First Student, of the school district’s fleet of buses which were reportedly purchased with grant money.
Doing so would amount to a loss of control, board member Annabella Lastowski reportedly said, as well as a loss of assets.
Ultimately, such moves could result in a loss of bus drivers, too. Outsourcing union school bus driving jobs might save school districts money temporarily, but it could also strip the benefits, job protections, and salary increases from current and future drivers.
School districts across the country are struggling to establish a steady pool of bus drivers not just because Americans are moving on to better jobs but also because there has been a steady decline in funding for public institutions. This means districts frequently have to tighten their belts in order to survive, even if it means putting more and more bus routes in the hands of private, profit-minded operators.