Savannah-Chatham schools must find stopgap answer to driver shortage to ensure students have transportation to classes come August and start of school
Adam Van Brimmer|Savannah Morning News
This is a column by Opinion Editor Adam Van Brimmer.
School bus transportation is as confounding to Savannah-Chatham school officials as advanced trig is for students.
The district buses some 25,000 kids among 290-plus routes. That includes transporting some from one end of the county to other and more to schools with a countywide attendance zone.
For five years now, officials have worked on the challenge. They've explored a hub system, a textbook's worthof routing strategies and other alternatives. School Board members haverepeatedly pressedthem to find answers, anticipating that eventuallythis problem would become a crisis.
That day has come, brought onby a bus driver shortage. The district's solution? Denytransportation to approximately 5,000 students to start the school year while new drivers are recruited and trained.
That answer on a trig test would cause theteacher to sigh in disappointment.
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Make no mistake, commercial driver’s license holders are a hot commodity right now. Chatham Area Transit has just enough drivers currently to cover their routes, according to a CAT spokesman. Local trolley tour drivers are circling the Historic District nonstop as pent up travel demand carries into Savannah’s blistering summer months. An uptick in construction and port activity has drivers moving behind the wheels of dump trucks and tractor trailers instead of buses.
Getting every student who needs a ride to school to the building is a challenge, but it’s one that must be met somehow, some way.
A lame response
School system leaders ramped up driver recruiting efforts earlier this year but didn’t publicize the issue until late June when they sent out a transportation survey to parents and outlined the “priority” categories. They neglected to sound the alarm about the extent of the shortage —57 fewer drivers than a year ago and 87 less than 2019 levels — and make a public appeal to retirees and others potential drivers until the start of school was just five weeks away.
CDL training is a six-week program.
Efforts to find other stopgap solutions, such asforging partnerships with CAT or other local transportation operators, seem halfhearted. A district spokeswomansay talks with CAT, a fellow taxpayer-funded entity, are ongoing but "have not proven fruitful."
Board President Joe Buck all but dismissesthe idea of working with CAT, citing difficulties in past attempts. Heincorrectly stated during last week's board meeting that CAT is operating only 30% of its routes.
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School Board Member Shawn Kachmar diplomatically expressed the frustration that many in the publicare feeling when he told his colleagues “... we need to look at driver sharing, route sharing and other creative ways to partner with” CAT.
The same goes for the tour trolleys. Surely they’d welcome school bus drivers to supplement their workforce in the middle of the day and late afternoons and could be persuaded to free up some of their own drivers to run school routes as tour demand wanes in August.
Other options
The district could think outside the busto accommodate bus riders.
Perhaps drastic adjustments to bell times at choice schools, such as Charles Ellis or Garrison or STEM, to allow drivers to run double routes?
Or helping coordinate and even subsidizing carpools for students who live in close proximity to each other and attend the same school or schools in the same geographic area?
Or offer virtual classes for affected students until the bus driver openings are filled?
Such solutions are logistical nightmares for district officials —but better them than hundreds or even thousands of families whoenrolledin choice schools and in magnet programs with the understanding that transportation would be provided
The current situation is reminiscent of what played out this time a year ago, when the school system was scrambling to secure laptops for students to start school virtually. A supply chain issue left the district thousands of computers short, but officials decided to start school anyway, forcing computer-less students to learn on their own for weeks using paper lesson plans.
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As Mrs. Green, my elementary school bus driver, told me every time I misbehaved on the way to and from school, “You can do better than that.” Savannah-Chatham County needs to do better on busing.
Contact Van Brimmer at avanbrimmer@savannahnow.com.
