Without more drivers, wheels on rural Minnesota school buses can’t go ’round

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Like any ‘80s and ‘90s kid with a long school bus ride, I learned to live by “bus law.”

Older kids in the back; young ones up front. Backpacks can’t save a seat forever, but throw-up can. Don’t mouth off to the moody kid in a jean jacket or you might take a skateboard across the head. And everyone knew — even the kids who ate boogers — that if food touched the floor it was gone forever.

When Penny was driving, you didn’t expect a fast ride. She gently eased the bus down the tree-lined roads of northern Minnesota. She played by the rules and kept an eye on everything. You’d be spared the bullies and loudmouth tots.

If Bob was driving, you rode yellow lightning, arriving to school before teachers finished their last smoke in the parking lot. Sleeping kids lost their glasses against the window on tight turns. What happened behind him was not Bob’s concern, until the screams turned dire. Then, like Jack Palance in his most dastardly role, he’d spin around and shout, “Knock it off!” The bus would hush to funeral silence for about 12 seconds before anarchy resumed.

Perhaps “bus law” has changed since then, but we always got to school. Mom and Dad never had to wonder how, which is good because there were years when our family car was not a reliable backup plan.

Public schools have provided busing to rural Minnesota schools for more than 100 years, including a few horse and carriage operations back in the 1890s.

Today, we take busing for granted. A majority of American kids now arrive at school in a private vehicle, according to a recent analysis by the Washington Post. As a result, morning drop-off and afternoon pickup lines snake into traffic like stressed-out caterpillars.

But for many working families and those in rural Minnesota, this just isn’t an option, especially as school consolidations create even longer distances to school. Roughly one-third of U.S. kids still take the bus, with higher proportions in rural areas.

That’s why an acute shortage of bus drivers, which was exacerbated by the pandemic and the overall worker shortage that ensued, threatens one of the most fundamental rights of kids in our state: the right for everyone to go to school.

This summer, Spanier Bus Service parked a bus inside the Crossroads Center mall in St. Cloud to attract potential drivers. A banner on a Shubat Transportation bus parked along the highway in Hibbing promises $25 an hour and free training. Shubat managed to fill its routes for the start of the school year, but three of its 16 bus routes will be driven by long-term substitutes.

Districts that provide their own transportation services face similar challenges. The St. Louis County School District covers a 4,200-square-mile range serving five small schools in northeastern Minnesota. Thirty buses and 28 vans cover more than a million miles a year, mostly in towns without large workforces.

Over the past 10 years, rising costs and fewer drivers forced St. Louis County schools to go from 42 bus routes to 30, increasing ride times for some students to almost 90 minutes one way. The district finished hiring regular route drivers just days before the school year started, but still needs subs.

Mankato-based Palmer Bus Service provides transportation for 28 mostly rural school districts spanning from the Iowa border to the Iron Range. It employs 1,200 people while transporting 39,000 students. For Palmer, hiring never stops.

“The market [for drivers] is really tight,” said Shane Johnson, the company’s chief operations officer. “We compete against Kwik Trip and Casey’s and smaller businesses that don’t require background checks.”

Minnesota bus drivers must have a commercial driver’s license with a school bus endorsement. Johnson said the process of becoming a bus driver can take up to 60 days, which is often too long for people seeking employment right away.

In addition, driving a bus is part-time work. You generally log two hours of work in the morning and two more in the afternoon. Drivers can add more hours with extracurricular runs and special routes, but it’s rarely full time.

That means that college students, parents, coaches and educational paraprofessionals comprise much of the workforce. Historically, retirees often helped fill out the driver ranks, too.

“It used to be a lot of retired miners and firefighters and police officers would drive a bus to keep busy,” said Dustin Davidson, owner of Shubat Transportation in Hibbing. “We don’t see as much of that anymore. We just try to get across that people should try driving a bus. It’s a good job.”

But it is a job with a lot of responsibility. Drivers must have a clean driving record and the right disposition.

“The driver needs to be the complete package,” said Kay Cornelius, transportation director for St. Louis County Schools. “Driving isn’t just sitting in a seat and rolling down the highway. It’s a classroom job, only your classroom is behind you.”

Indeed, anyone who ever struggled with parallel parking might shudder at the thought of piloting a steel tube full of children. But Davidson said technology is making the experience safer and easier.

“The technology on buses now is amazing,” he said. “We have cameras on all the danger zones now. Video screens show the whole perimeter of the bus.”

Remote vehicle tracking also makes it easy for parents to follow the bus on a phone app so they know when their kids will be home. These advancements ensure safety and reduce stress on drivers, but also raise costs for bus services.

“There’s a lot more electronics on every bus and every time you add things that could go wrong and cost money,” said Davidson. “Same for the engines. The buses are getting to be emissions-free, even the diesels. Our buses are 95% cleaner than in the early 2000s. But it comes with expensive sensors and diesel exhaust systems.”

At the same time, the source of funding for bus contracts has been squeezed as rural school districts have experienced decades of declining enrollments and shrinking property tax revenue.

This financial pressure can create unsafe conditions if contractors take shortcuts. Last year, Palmer took over the contract for the Greenway and Nashwauk-Keewatin districts on the Iron Range after the previous contractor, NK-G Transportation, defaulted on loans and was cited for several Minnesota Department of Transportation safety violations.

“I was disappointed that a contractor let things get to that point,” said Johnson. “The flip side is that the system worked and the state patrol recognized an issue. Fortunately, no one got hurt.”

Despite the fiscal strain, bus operators know what they do is important.

“Our world has changed a lot, even in the past 15 years,” said Cornelius. “Being more aware of the emotional well-being is important for our drivers. They see kids who just got out of bed and might need a little more care than the school would see.”

Johnson said that one regulatory change could put more drivers through the licensing pipeline. Minnesota has yet to tap into a federal law allowing states to relax the mechanical knowledge requirement on the CDL test. This knowledge is useful to an over-the-road truck driver, but bus drivers can’t fix their own buses for safety reasons.

“I hope Minnesota could take a look at this to help keep drivers on the road,” said Johnson. “It would really help.”

Despite the challenges, operators say taking kids to school, field trips and extracurricular activities remains a rewarding job.

“Driving a school bus is not as scary as people think it is,” said Cornelius. “It’s a big responsibility, but there is a benefit, too. … Kids are true souls.”

These are part-time jobs that serve the greater community, ideal for those bridging the end of one career to retirement. I still remember my bus drivers. Kids will remember the dedication of today’s drivers, too.