Jasper Co. schools turn to teachers, staff to help alleviate critical bus driver shortage
The Jasper County School District has come up with a unique solution to the chronic bus driver shortage — ask teachers, principals and other staff to do it.
“We don’t have applicants lined up to drive, so we are trying to help internally,” Superintendent Rechel Anderson said at a meeting held for parents Wednesday night at Ridgeland Elementary School.
Parents, meanwhile, are frustrated, and angry.
“They told us this would last six to 12 weeks and then it would be resolved,” said one parent, Kimberly Morgan. “Well, here it is February, and we’re still taking kids back and forth to school.”
Some parents have lost their jobs because they had to choose between working and taking and picking up their kids from school, according to another parent, Randi Woodruff.
“My neighbor down here ... she’s having to think, ‘Do I take my preschooler to school or put food on the table?’” Morgan said. “And there are several parents in the car line (who) told me the same thing. This is getting sad.”
Last year, the district operated 14 of its 39 buses. Now, the number has dwindled to seven, including one special education bus, Anderson said.
So far, an assistant principal at Ridgeland Elementary school, a clerical worker and several paraprofessionals within the district have offered to become drivers. These individuals are either preparing to complete their certification or have already done so. Bryan Jefferson, who is a principal at Hardeeville Elementary School, and Stefan Bauroth, the school’s assistant principal, are already driving.
Neither Jefferson nor Bauroth could immediately be reached for comment.
Anderson said the district has offered sign-on, attendance and retention bonuses to drivers in addition to a monthly stipend of $250. The district also has offered to pay for staff to get their Department of Transportation physicals and obtain their Class B commercial drivers’ licenses (CDL).
Drivers will also be guaranteed pay for six hours of driving per day, even if they drive fewer than six hours, and will have health-care benefits, Anderson said. Drivers currently are paid anywhere from $11.89 to $18 an hour, depending on their level of service.
“Even with all of that, we still don’t have anyone applying for the position,” Anderson said. “So, what do we do? ... We would love to move them, but we don’t have the bodies to move the buses.”
The district, Anderson said, has been talking with the South Carolina State Department of Transportation and the National Guard. When the district reached out to the National Guard for help, school officials were told that “was not an option,” she said.
Until there is a solution, Anderson asked parents — many of whom are carpooling — to continue driving their children to school.
In the meantime, drivers have been running “double routes” for schools in the area to alleviate the strain, but they are exhausted, Anderson said.
The driver shortage, she said, is statewide. South Carolina ranked in the top 10 in a Wallet Hub Study comparing hiring struggles in different states during the pandemic using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics. From that data, researchers found that in the Hilton Head Island metropolitan area, which included Jasper County, the estimated hourly wage for the area is $15.58 for people working in transportation.
The national hourly wage for that occupation is $19.08, according to the data. Angry parents in Wednesday night’s meeting suggested increasing the pay for drivers the way other school districts have, but, Anderson said, “Beaufort has a tax revenue we don’t have, they can afford that.”
A bill in the South Carolina Legislature would raise bus driver pay from $8.44 an hour to at least $8.86 an hour. School districts, however, may pay more than the minimum, sometimes reaching $17 to $25 an hour.
‘They don’t care about these kids’
As the struggle to hire more drivers continues, students are arriving late to school and missing class, said Morgan, a mother of two students in Jasper County schools. Anderson addressed this in a Feb. 14 meeting and said teachers are working to help those students catch up with assignments and lessons they may have missed.
“They (the students) are getting to school and we do have a couple of families that we are aware of that we are tracking and monitoring ... until we can get them to school,” Anderson said.
The frustration has come to a head in recent months and, some parents like Woodruff, who has four children in three different Jasper County schools, are considering pulling their kids out of the district.
“If I’m going to drive every day to a school, I’d rather it be a school that cares about my kids rather than a school that has no care,” said Woodruff. “It’s about money for them. They don’t care about these kids.”
Morgan said driving her 8-year-old and 14-year-old back and forth is costing her nearly $240 a month in gas. Some are carpooling with neighbors and their children’s classmates in order to offset these costs, but Morgan and her husband were reluctant to accept that liability.
Woodruff said she hasn’t been back to work since the pandemic because of the “inconsistency of school” with transportation. She said that on the first day of the 2022-23 school year, her 11-year-old daughter went missing, but was later found.
“Nobody knew where she was and nobody knew how to get a hold of the bus driver to find out where she was,” she said. “It’s a parent’s worst nightmare.”
There was no talk about students returning to virtual classes until more drivers can be hired and Travis Washington, the spokesperson for the Jasper County School District, declined a request to comment on the transportation problems.
“Something needs to be done, and it needs to be done quick or else Jasper County is going to lose a lot of kids,” Morgan said.
This story was originally published February 25, 2022 at 10:00 AM.
