As kids head back to school, bus drivers and crossing guards remain in short supply in northwestern Ontario

As kids head back to school this week, organizations that hire crossing guards and bus drivers in northwestern Ontario say more help is needed to get them there safely.

On Tuesday, the first day of the school year, several bus routes in the region were cancelled, in part because of staff shortages.

Iron Range bus lines still needs three or four more drivers in Sioux Lookout and another five to 10 in Thunder Bay, according to general manager Eric Lehto. 

The company is able to cover all its routes in most areas, he said, but it currently has no drivers available to back anyone up if someone gets sick.

"It's certainly been a struggle over the last couple of years, as everyone knows," Lehto said. "Right now, the position we're in is good. We have everything covered in most of our divisions. We're obviously very thin for drivers everywhere," he said. 

Iron Range provides the necessary training and administrative work to help employees secure the Class B license required to operate a school bus, he added.

Trainer and driver Sharon Scott, who is going into her tenth school year with the company, said she was intimidated at first by the size of the bus, but it only took her a couple of weeks to learn to drive it.

"It is quite comfortable and quite easy to manoeuvre once you know how to take your proper turns and make sure you're looking at your mirrors," she said.

Scott makes descriptive notes on her route sheets, describing houses and landmarks she has to stop at, in order to help her memorize her routes, she added.

"If you're fortunate, you might get the same route next year," she said. "So it's just a little bit easier that way."

The field supervisor of crossing guards for the City of Thunder Bay said the city currently has six locations without guards. 

"I am using a couple of our spare guards to cover some of them," Michelle Riemer said. "But we are definitely short and struggling to find people."

While she waits for more candidates to present themselves, Riemer is making sure the guards she has cover all but the safest of intersections, she said.

In some cases, intersections are very close to schools, and members of the school staff can help children cross.

In other cases, two nearby schools let out nearly an hour apart, allowing one guard to work two different crossings at different times.

Crossing guards in Thunder Bay earn $17.70 an hour for two and a quarter hours, Riemer said,  and the job requires candidates to pass a work fitness test, vision test and police vulnerable sector check.

It also requires people to be able to stand for more than an hour holding a sign.

This isn't the first time there has been a shorage of crossing guards in northern Ontario, in February officials in Sudbury and Timmins raised the issue, with one company owner saying they were "crying for workers."

"It's part time with [a] split shift, so it is harder to recruit for, of course," Riemer said. "If somebody is looking for more hours, there [are] no more hours."

A need to 'make work meaningful again'

The director of the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources at the University of Toronto said that the shortages of crossing guards and school bus drivers reflect a wider trend in the labour market.

"These are people who have either been near retirement or perhaps retired from their first job and then took on kind of a post-retirement or pre-retirement role," Raphael Gomez said.

"That's part of the labour force that we saw during the pandemic exit the labour force in greater numbers."

Some of those who have returned to the labour market have sought out higher-paying jobs to keep up with inflation, he added.

Recruiting more bus drivers and crossing guards might require raising the pay for those positions, Gomez said. But it also involves raising the value of the job in other ways.

"I think we have a lot of work to do to make work meaningful again and to tell people how important those jobs are to communities," he said.

"You know, someone driving their children to school – how important is that?"