A lack of bus drivers in Killingly, Plainfield is causing problems beyond the school day

For Bryony Chamberlain, vice president for school buses for Dattco, the operations in Woodstock, Thompson, and Plainfield usually have enough drivers to spare some for Dattco’s operations in other parts of the state. However, with fewer bus drivers available, the Plainfield and Woodstock routes have just enough and the Thompson routes are lacking drivers because of some COVID cases among the drivers.

“We’ve had to tighten up our routes and have less flexibility in the whole system,” Chamberlain said.

According to USA Today, a lack of bus drivers is an issue playing out across the country, from Milwaukee Public Schools being 100 drivers short for their 700 bus fleet, to Massachusetts authorizing 250 national guard personnel to drive school transport vans, and a school district in Rochester, New York, requiring families to provide their own transport or let their kids walk to school.

Chamberlain said the reason behind the lack of drivers is because of bus drivers typically being retirees, who have been cautious during the pandemic.

“A lot of those people have not wanted to continue working,” Chamberlain said.

Robert Angeli, Killingly Public Schools superintendent, agrees.

“A lot of the new applicants coming in for the driving positions tend not to be those retirees that once considered driving a bus,” Angeli said.

Killingly Public Schools operates its own buses, and has seen issues with having enough bus drivers before. In the spring of the prior school year, there was a shortage with the full return to school, and there was even a point where the school had to return to remote learning for two days because there weren’t enough drivers.

“If we had a driver who had to quarantine, we had to reroute kids, because there were no substitute drivers,” Angeli said.

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This year, Angeli said there hasn’t been any remote learning from the lack of drivers but bus runs have been combined and even the district’s transportation director had to drive.

Angeli said the lack of bus drivers has also impacted sports, as the athletic bus runs for the middle and high school teams have been delayed or canceled to accommodate for the regular bus routes.  

There have been incentives for bus drivers to join, but there’s still the logistical challenge of filling the void left if someone were to leave. Chamberlain said someone can resign with a day or a week’s notice, but the training takes 16 weeks.

“That doesn’t balance out for us, so that’s made us very tight,” Chamberlain said.

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Chamberlain said it could take a year to recover to pre-pandemic bus driver numbers, which includes six extra for Plainfield and three extra for Woodstock. First, the bus company would bring back enough people to have backups for the altered routes, before then hiring more drivers and resuming the traditional routes. In the meantime, the buses are still travelling long routes to make up for the lack of drivers, and Chamberlain wants people to be patient with the bus drivers.  

“It might not seem as logical to parents, the route we’re taking, but it’s done that way to get as many people on to the same vehicles as possible,” Chamberlain said.