Lawmakers looking at solutions to bus driver shortage

3 years ago 331

TULSA, Okla. — Sweeping changes to autobus operator regulations are connected the treatment lists successful this upcoming legislative session.

Many schoolhouse districts crossed Oklahoma are doing much with little erstwhile it comes to the autobus operator crisis.

Bixby Public School parents received a substance connection past week coming from administrators saying determination would beryllium a district-wide closure owed to a autobus operator shortage. They're not the lone territory struggling.

The quality of the closure successful Bixby reached the table of Secretary of Education Ryan Walters.

”Again, this is nationwide, it’s an contented with however we transport kids to school,” says Walters.

Walters besides is the manager of the non-profit Every Kid Counts Oklahoma truthful helium knows schools, their obstacles, and imaginable solutions.

”Because again we deliberation astir the emblematic yellowish schoolhouse autobus and of people we request those," Walters states. "But determination are different ways to transport kids to schoolhouse arsenic well.”

Those different ways Walters mentions could see relaxing immoderate of the driving qualifications for drivers, utilizing different forms of proscription connected autobus routes, and adjacent sharing buses with neighboring schoolhouse districts.

”We’re astatine concern critical. Bus drivers contiguous are shorter than they person ever been successful the past of schoolhouse transportation,” says Brad Smythe, Director of Operations for Muskogee Public Schools.

For Muskogee Public Schools, their routes astir chopped successful fractional successful the past 4 to 5 years. All due to the fact that of a deficiency of drivers.

Smythe says their impermanent hole is to get coaches and teachers with commercialized drivers licenses down the wheel.

"We are looking astatine our ain people. We’re talking astir moving immoderate radical from kid nutrition. People who are custodians that possibly 4-hour custodians oregon kid nutrition radical that are going to enactment 8-hours," says Smythe. "We’re going to nonstop them to school. We’re going to bid them to thrust a autobus conscionable similar this,”

It's a captious concern that the state's Secretary of Education is urging lawmakers to enactment connected the adjacent legislative session.

”As a genitor of a young girl successful nationalist school—I’m telling you if she can’t spell to schoolhouse 1 time it is, ’Dad we don’t person schoolhouse tomorrow?’" Walters says. "We person young radical that are depending upon their teachers, they’re depending upon the schoolhouse to drawback up connected the learning nonaccomplishment that’s been experienced implicit the past year,”

Just successful Muskogee Public Schools alone, the territory is offering a $500 signing bonus to get a commercialized driver's license.

For now, schoolhouse districts volition person to hold until adjacent twelvemonth to spot the bills that volition get filed, but this concern goes bigger. There's a lobbying effort underway astatine the national level arsenic well.

Trending Stories: