SPS raises entry-level pay more than 30 percent to recruit bus drivers

Aug. 15—In an ongoing effort to recruit more school bus drivers for the district, Stillwater Public Schools offered a raise for entry-level bus drivers with funding from the Oklahoma legislature.

Original entry-level pay started at $12.38 an hour. That's been raised to $16.57, a 33.8 percent increase for the first three months.

Classes started Thursday, and as 6,096 students returned to class, things went "fairly smoothly," SPS Transportation Director Matt Parsel said.

With 24 routes, that can be a challenge. And there are two more routes that do not have a regular full-time bus driver.

Even so, the first couple of days were typical — with students figuring out which route they were on and a few routes having to be changed to get students home.

But SPS still had to cancel one route on Friday and two routes were canceled Monday. Parsel has combined routes as much as possible, and he's consistently worked on tracking the routes for effectiveness.

"For the most part ... I can't combine things anymore," Parsel said. "There's not enough space, there's not enough time."

He said most parents have been understanding, while there have been some concerns.

"I understand why and what they want," Parsel said. "We're working on it."

The district is hiring a few more drivers to fill that need, but not all routes will have substitutes and it will not be easy to fill every spot.

"Out of 24 routes that we run every day, people get sick," Parsel said. "And then we have activities that we try to cover, and most of those occur between 2 and 3 p.m. ... and that's usually right in the middle of our route time."

Throughout the year, SPS worked to fill the positions needed by posting the job listing at multiple sites — including Indeed and Workforce Oklahoma — and holding a job fair on July 20 to recruit more drivers and substitutes and other support staff.

The district put the word out on WNEP News Channel 16, across their social media channels, on buses around town with banners and promoted the job listing in communications with stakeholders, said SPS Communications Coordinator Barry Fuxa.

All bus drivers are now on a level 5 pay scale. One level of pay has been discontinued and this allowed the transportation department to start entry-levels drivers at a higher pay.

"That part is to bring new drivers in," Parsel said. "The support across the board is to keep them even since teachers are getting that mandated raise from the state — the board wants to show that same support to the support staff because they also need that."

The new pay raise is about a four and a half dollar increase.

"That's kind of a probationary period, getting people a chance to get in and get their license and be able to drive," Parsel said.

Along with the 15 percent raise for the rest of the year, a first-time driver with SPS makes "about 20 percent more that first year," Fuxa said.

Even with the higher pay, bus drivers are usually only 9-month employees, and typically, it's a 6-hour day, not an 8-hour day.

Finding drivers can be an issue, Parsel said, because for parents who might want to be a bus driver, the hours they could work conflict with their normal work schedule. Retirees may not want to work those hours or drive the back roads anymore, and others who are trying to maximize their income find that the hours also conflict with their full-time jobs.

Another challenge is finding people who want to get their CDL and the required bus driver endorsements — a "P" for "passenger" and "S" for school bus, and in some cases, an air brakes license.

Although entry-level drivers need only a Class A driver's license to start work, many potential drivers do not want to complete the rest of the required state-level training, which includes a written test, a 14-day permit and a state-issued bus driver certification that involves a 24-hour course (19 hours of which is online).

The federal government also mandated that drivers go through Entry-Level Driver Training, or ELDT. But that usually only takes a few hours, Parsel said.

"It depends a lot on the person," Parsel said. "It really can be done in that two weeks ... if you apply yourself and get everything done."

For now, the district is getting some help from parents who volunteer to take students to games, and some have said they could help once a month. But to pay parents to drive only once a month isn't cost effective or practical, Parsel said.

"If we had a lot of people that do at least one day a week, that might be worthwhile," Parsel said. "We need some kind of commitment and to know what day they're actually going to show up."