LANSDALE — While state and local officials work on ways to address a nationwide shortage of school bus drivers, one local group may have some solutions.
The Pennsylvania School Bus Association, an advocacy group that represents bus drivers across the state, is based in Lansdale and has taken several steps recently to help address the shortage.
“For anybody interested, we do have two websites that are public-facing, that you’ll be able to access. The first is YouBehindTheWheel.com — that is a content micro-site that has blog posts, it’s got information on how to become a school bus driver, the pay that you can expect, do you have weekends off, et cetera,” said Ryan Dellinger, executive director of PSBA.
“That is really just designed for people who are interested in learning more about the industry, and whether or not that might be right for them,” he said.
On Thursday, Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration announced several steps meant to help ease the state’s shortage of bus drivers, citing a drop of roughly four percent in the total number of active drivers in the state since 2017.
PSBA is located on Broad Street in Lansdale, and was founded in 1980 to act as a voice for more than 300 school transportation contractors across the state, and share information and programs among them, according to the group’s website PASchoolBus.org. While PSBA officials did not respond to a request for comment on Wolf’s announcements this week, the group has posted a series of news briefs this summer addressing the shortage, and comments from Dellinger here are taken from a podcast appearance with the National School Transportation Association discussing the shortage in August.
The second new site set up by PSBA is SchoolBusHero.com, “which is a public-facing job board that PSBA contractor members can use to post available positions in their company. So people can go search by city, they can search by ZIP code, and find the nearest PSBA contractor that may be hiring,” Dellinger said.
PSBA has also been running online ad campaigns on platforms including Facebook and YouTube to publicize those sites, and has shared information across the state with companies trying to recruit drivers. The two sites, and PSBA’s homepage, also spell out further information about what’s behind the bus shortage, and Dellinger said causes include the long training period, combined with COVID concerns.
“People may not realize, you need your CDL (commercial driver’s license). They may not realize, you’ve got mandated reporter training, you’ve got your child abuse training, your background checks, et cetera,” Dellinger said.
“I think it’s valuable to get that message out there,” he said.
If a potential driver meets all screening criteria and does not have a CDL, the hiring process usually takes about 12 weeks to complete all approvals and training, a timeline that Wolf’s actions this week may compress by keeping license centers open longer and contacting those with CDLs who are not actively driving.
“We are definitely going to be ensuring that our recruitment campaign continues, to make sure that we’re able to catch those people who are coming off of unemployment, that need to look for work,” he said. “The candidate pool for school bus drivers is already relatively small as-is, so when you start incentivizing people to not return to work, that pool just continues to shrink. It really takes a special sort of person to leave that sort of benefit, and choose to come back into the industry.”
Changes from the state legislature could be coming, but not in the near term. According to Dellinger, PSBA helped lobby for House Resolution 15 of 2021, which passed in June and directs a state commission “to conduct a study of the school bus driver industry, and provide recommendations on how to address the driver shortage.” Similar studies in recent years have led to legislation encouraging recruitment and retention of emergency responders such as volunteer firefighters, Dellinger said, and a similar study — with a PSBA representative on the advisory committee — could yield similar results.
“After those studies had been completed, a flurry of legislation came out, with various legislators picking up on the recommendations, to say ‘Hey, this is what they think is going to help the industry.’” Dellinger said.
“I anticipate a lot of the same situation happening with this school bus driver shortage, once the report is published around June of next year. We’re very excited to be able to participate in that process,” he said.
For more information on the Pennsylvania School Bus Association visit www.paschoolbus.org
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