GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — The school year is just around the corner, and districts are facing staffing shortages inside and outside the classroom.
Many bus companies are still struggling to find drivers for the school year.
Lamers Bus Lines provides service for around 35 different school districts across the state. Seventeen districts in Northeast Wisconsin serviced by Lamers are still looking for drivers.
“That’s always a concern, one that keeps you awake at night. But, again, we just work on planning,” says Lamers School Bus Operations Manager Cindi Lawler. “We are fortunate here that in this area we have five terminals that are fairly close together so we do help each other out.”
Lawler says the school districts have been flexible with Lamers.
“We have made routes absolutely as efficient as possible and tried to use up every available moment of space on the schedules. It’s been a challenge, definitely, trying new things we have never done before,” says Lawler.
Lamers says in order to stay competitive, they raised their starting wage to $22/hour for drivers.
Barb Pesmark is coming up on her 35th year of being a school bus driver and says the wage is one of the reasons she stays with Lamers.
“In a few weeks, we will be up to the highest paid bus drivers in this area,” says Pesmark.
But the shortage is also affecting current drivers.
“More hours, because there’s a lot of people that don’t want to come and drive because of COVID… I think that’s the big issue why we can’t get people out here to drive,” says Pesmark.
There is more to the job than driving to and from school.
“The hiring process never ends. Once you ever would get the routes covered — and it’s been a long time since that’s happened — then we have so much charter work going on, school field trips, athletics, things like that,” says Lawler.
The process for getting a permit and training to become a bus driver is about three to four weeks.
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