Budget increase not enough to solve Alberta school bus driver shortage, industry leader says
Madeleine Cummings | CBC News | Posted: March 7, 2022 2:00 PM | Last Updated: March 7, 2022
‘We’re in serious trouble,’ Alberta School Bus Contractors’ Association president says
Getting three kids to and from school has become a huge hassle for Jon Ballard and his wife.
His family lives about 10 minutes away from the northern Alberta hamlet of Ardmore, where his daughter attends school.
His two teenage sons attend a high school in the town of Bonnyville, and two weeks ago, that bus route was temporarily cancelled due to a lack of drivers.
Ballard and his wife have been shuttling the teens to and from school, and though they carpool with neighbours, the trips are taking a toll — racking up gas costs and cutting into their working hours. Last week, his daughter's bus also wasn't running.
"There are days that our kids do have to miss school because we just can't accommodate everything," he said.
Recognizing that a province-wide shortage of school bus drivers has put school divisions in a difficult position, Ballard is urging the provincial government to increase student transportation funding.
"Let's pay the drivers more," he told CBC News on Thursday.
Nicole Garner, a communications officer for Northern Lights Public Schools (NLPS), said in the last few years, more small contractors have been either retiring or leaving the business due to increased operating costs.
"It has been extremely difficult to find drivers to fill vacancies," she said.
Between two to four routes have been temporarily cancelled this year, and though the school division has consolidated routes to address a driver shortage, all its buses are now running at full capacity.
The driver shortage is affecting both rural and urban communities. Communications officers for Edmonton's public and Catholic school divisions said driver shortages are still causing school bus delays, though the situation has been improving.
Garner said NLPS expects the shortage will worsen as parents who drove their kids to school to reduce the risk of COVID-19 exposure during the pandemic put kids back on the bus.
What's driving the shortage?
Mark Critch, president of the Alberta School Bus Contractors' Association, said finding people willing to work a part-time job with a split shift has been difficult for years, but because of the rising costs of insurance, training, parts and maintenance, transportation companies have little to no room to raise drivers' pay.
"We're in serious trouble as an industry," he said.
On Friday, 67 school bus driver positions in Alberta were listed on the job site Indeed, with hourly pay ranging between $16 and $26.
Critch said the provincial government's $9 million budget increase for student transportation next year will not solve the problem.
"The growth in the revenue coming into school districts for transportation is not even close to what the cost increases have been over the last while for our contractors and school districts," he said.
Task force studied shortage
Critch and other industry stakeholders sat on a task force that reviewed student transportation and made more than 20 recommendations to Alberta Education Minister Adriana LaGrange in November 2020.
One of the group's recommendations was temporarily modifying or relaxing Mandatory Entry Level Training requirements — training requirements (introduced in 2019) that school divisions consider a major barrier to hiring new drivers.
The task force also suggested Alberta Education work with other ministries on driver recruitment strategies and ensure its funding model was fair and sustainable.
Katherine Stavropoulos, press secretary for the education minister, said the recent budget includes a $39 million increase in school transportation funding over the next three years to help address increasing costs and prevent them from being passed on to families.
She said a new student transportation funding model is in the works and the government is also examining a provincial purchasing program (for buses, fuel, insurance and parts) and trying to improve regional cooperation among school divisions.
Other strategies
Garner said NLPS created its own driving school so it could reduce costs by training drivers locally. The division's board also gave school bus contractors a three per cent pay increase this year to offset rising costs, but that was not enough to retain some operators, she said.
Critch said his Fort McMurray-based company, Sparksman Transportation, has focused on making the job appealing to new parents. Drivers working for the company may bring up to two kids with them to work.
"COVID notwithstanding, we haven't had the same challenges that other parts of the province have had," he said.