- #Fairfax county school bus driver shortage drivers#
- #Fairfax county school bus driver shortage license#
Patrice Sykes, of Aurora, said she called one morning after no one was picking up her sixth- and eighth-grade children to get them to Simmons Middle School on time for classes. She is now dropping her son off and picking him up from school herself until she receives word that the bus schedule is back to normal. “There were kids there who were distraught and scared and these are second-graders who are just coming off a year of the pandemic and being at home, so to come back to school and for this to happen is sad,” said Shea, who did not want her last name used. and was met with a hungry boy in tears, she said.
She decided to go pick him up around 5:30 p.m. One parent said that when her second-grade son wasn’t home from Allen Elementary School two hours after classes let out, she began to worry and called the school to learn that her son was still at the school due to the busing problem. But during the winter, my middle school has 1,000 kids and I can’t have 500 cars backing up Farnsworth (Avenue).” “People are livid and upset and just driving their kids themselves. “You’ll think you are at Soldier Field after the Bears game,” Norrell said.
Some are having to park up to a mile away and then walking to get their child. Norrell said many frustrated parents are swarming East Aurora schools to pick up their children themselves after classes let out. In some ways, this is a bigger challenge than last year because then everyone knew what was going on and now with the delta variant it has thrown another monkey wrench at us in terms of having kids in schools.” “We see people talk on social media, so we know people are feeling anger and we understand it. “We are doing our best to get parents to help us out,” Hernandez said.
#Fairfax county school bus driver shortage license#
The school district has emailed staff and asked anyone who has a commercial driver’s license or is interested in taking training to drive smaller buses to get in touch with district officials. Special education students are bused through a contract with Septran Inc., which is seeing a bus driver shortage and changes to routes, he said. There are no buses to take middle school athletes to away games during the fall season and the district is asking parents to carpool to provide the needed transportation. Plainfield School District 202 also uses First Student for its bus system and has not had issues with driver shortages to get students to and from school, but they have faced other issues, said Tom Hernandez, the district’s director of community relations. In the meantime, we truly appreciate the community’s patience.” “We hope to add them to our workforce in the coming weeks. “Our applicant flow is steady and we do have 15 driver candidates in various stages of training,” Kemper said in a statement.
#Fairfax county school bus driver shortage drivers#
I didn’t have any extra money.”įirst Student Bus Company spokesman Chris Kemper said the bus industry was already managing a driver shortage even before the pandemic hit.įirst Student is actively hiring, recruiting and training new drivers in the Fox Valley area and has increased starting wages from $18 to $24.50 an hour and is offering hiring incentives, including a $2,500 sign-on bonus for new drivers and $3,000 for experienced drivers, company officials said. “I’m a far more impoverished district and I had to buy hotspots for students to have internet at home. “They said I only ran 28 routes instead of my regular 40 routes and now I’ve only kept seven or eight of the drivers I had from before the pandemic because I couldn’t pay,” Norrell said.
0 kommentar(er)
