It’s been 40 years since Abby Serna drove a school bus for Amador County Unified School District in Northern California, but this test drive in a 2024 Blue Bird Vision Propane school bus seemed to be going well.
“God, this is so nice,” Serna said after taking her first turn in the parking lot at McKenzie High School in Finn Rock.
“It’s like buh-duh,” the 61-year-old Vida woman joked, as the five of us on board, including McKenzie School District bus driver Danny Steele, who was standing just behind her and instructing, chuckled.
After cranking the wheel of the 36-foot-long, 15-ton bus toward the drop-off/pick-up spot for students in grades K-12, Serna glided toward the trickiest part of the test, a narrow space between two sets of poles on each side and …
“Oh! Oh! Oh!”
Why was the bus accelerating when the speed limit in the parking lot is 10 mph?
I don’t know about anybody else, but this reporter, sitting two seats behind Serna, ducked and covered. Surely we were about to hit the school building on our right, or one of those dang poles.
“Brake! Brake!” someone hollered as we flew over a speed bump and through the tight space and eventually came to a stop.
“What? I’m so sorry!” Serna stammered. “I hit the gas instead of the brake!
“They are kind of close together,” the 71-year-old Steele said.
The rest of the circle around the school went smoothly, and Serna even cracked wise about how she “did thread that needle” through the poles.
Wearing a tie-dye T-shirt under a long-sleeve jean shirt, Serna was one of four applicants, all women, who came Saturday, May 10, for the McKenzie School District’s “Drive the Bus BBQ” event, the district’s creative effort to find another school bus driver — or two — in what continues to be a challenge for not only school districts in Lane County and the rest of Oregon, but across the nation.
“Not a lot of people want to be in the bus with 30 to 40 kids that are potentially screaming,” said Justin Barker, transportation coordinator for McKenzie schools. “They can be maniacs sometimes. So it’s challenging.”
‘Shortage remains severe’
But it’s not just hollering kids that can be a deterrent to finding school bus drivers in these post-pandemic days.
“The school bus driver shortage remains severe, and bus driver pay is getting worse,” according to a November 2024 blog post from the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank “that works to counter rising inequality, low wages and weak benefits for working people.”
There were 12.2% fewer school bus drivers on the road nationally in September 2024 than five years earlier, according to the institute. And the median school bus driver in 2023 earned 43% less than the median weekly wage for all workers while weekly earnings for bus drivers fell by 2.8% since 2019.
Which is why school districts have been offering incentives and using all sorts of creative ways to entice new applicants.
The Eugene School District announced in February that it was offering a $2,000 incentive for new hires, plus another $1,000 if they referred another applicant who got hired.
District transportation managers “have definitely seen improvement in recruitment,” district spokesman Kelly McIver wrote in an email. “They say they’re getting more applications and better-qualified applicants who are able to be hired and deployed faster.”
But the Eugene School District still has “multiple vacancies” for bus driver specialists, according to a recent posting on the job employment site Indeed. The job pays from $21.43 to $26.89 an hour, depending on experience.
Other openings spotted online include jobs at:
in Eugene ($17.65-$18.73 an hour for substitute drivers)
($18.96 an hour for subs)
in Cottage Grove ($20.85-$27.21 an hour)
($17.38-$23.84 an hour)
($22.57-$23.99, plus $1,000 signing bonus), the private school bus company that contracts with Lane County school districts including Junction City, Oakridge and Pleasant Hill
“We’ve been down about four bus drivers from where we would like to be basically since the pandemic,” Chad Harrison, South Lane School District’s interim director, said. “Our transportation team here goes above and beyond to make sure most trips are met. It’s a challenge, which means we’re sometimes doubling up routes to make it work.”
At the Bethel School District in Eugene, the busing system has been stretched by “the sheer distance and frequency of legally required transports — some as far as Oakridge, Salem and Florence — for students in foster care, experiencing homelessness or needing special education services,” said district spokesperson Alisha Dodds, who added the district continues to find drivers, mostly through word-of-mouth recruiting.
“We’re proud to serve these students, who are some of our most vulnerable, because it matters, but the reality is that it’s incredibly hard on the system,” Dodds said.
Springfield Public Schools has three bus driver openings, spokesperson Brian Richardson said.
“While this is a limited number of openings, we are consistently recruiting for new bus drivers to ensure we have a broad workforce to meet the needs of our transportation department and students.”
As with most districts, several of the district’s drivers are of retirement age, which is why the Springfield district is always recruiting, Richardson said.
‘Wildly successful’
While $22.54 an hour, starting pay for the McKenzie School District bus driver openings, might not seem too shabby ($46,883 annually for a full-time, 40-hour workweek), most school districts don’t employ drivers for more than 32 hours a week.
And the McKenzie district jobs are only 16 hours a week for the three current drivers, about four hours a day, Monday through Thursday. That’s two hours taking kids to school in the morning and two hours taking them home in the afternoon. The 192-student district doesn’t hold classes on Fridays. And there’s no work from mid-June to mid-August.
So a 10-month-a-year job at $22.54 would bring in about $15,507 a year, plus partial benefits that include medical and payment into the state’s Public Employees Retirement System (PERS).
Marcus Junkin, 42, is the district’s most recent hire and started driving its mid-river route in January.
“I was just ready to do something different and not drive to town every day, and the community needed it,” he said of leaving his former job with REI in Eugene.
But Junkin also works as a bike mechanic at Horse Creek Lodge in McKenzie Bridge and is a river raft guide in the summer.
Barker was thrilled four applicants showed up Saturday, to not only test drive the district’s newest bus but also munch on hot dogs and chips and drink sodas, calling the event “wildly successful.”
It’s actually the second time the district has held such an event, doing the same thing in 2023. That’s how they found current driver Nancy Burns, a McKenzie High School alum.
“I’m actually kind of surprised,” Barker said of the event. “We even got someone from Eugene. If I’ve got too many applying, I’d say that’s a great problem to have.”
The district is offering a bonus up to $1,200 for drivers who can pass state and district requirements and complete the 15 hours of behind-the-wheel training with the district.
Barker has been driving the district’s Friday “activities route,” taking home kids who stay for after-school projects or sports. He expects to place the district’s next hire in that role, which also includes driving athletic teams to away games as far away as Portland, Pendleton or wherever they need to go.
Even McKenzie School District Superintendent Lane Tompkins has been transporting kids the past couple of years, securing his commercial driver’s license to do so.
Tompkins spent the first half of this school year driving one of the morning routes as Barker got settled in the coordinator role last fall and Junkin and Steele got trained and certified.
“I needed to step up because no one else was,” he said. “Everybody’s always looking, so if anybody reads your story and ends up (applying), that’s great, even if it’s not for us.”