Would You Manage 70 Children and a 15-Ton Vehicle for $18 an Hour? | Hacker News Reader

Would You Manage 70 Children and a 15-Ton Vehicle for $18 an Hour?

fivethirtyeight.com

53 pointsrectang63 comments

> The bus driver shortage isn’t just a bus driver shortage — it’s a knot nobody knows how to cut.

Uh, pay the drivers more than $37 a year, that wage is a joke anywhere in the US

Worse, $39K/year is extrapolated to full-time equivalent, which the job is not. Per the article:

But school bus drivers don’t work year-round, full-time hours. “We’re only guaranteed four hours of pay a day,” Steele said.

There are no paid holidays or sick days, she and other bus industry experts say. Benefits vary from company to company, and there’s no guaranteed work at all in summer. “Spring break is all unpaid. Every teacher-compensatory day, every snow day, any time they cannot pay us they will,” Steele said. She added that a recent, failed unionization effort among the Robbinsdale bus drivers started in part as a fight for snow-day pay.

so of course you have to figure out how to pay them for something else during the day. Why don't hire them to be workers in the school (sometimes called para-professionals).

If the schools can't hire enough bus drivers then they simply have to pay more money or not offer busing. The schools don't have tons of money just sitting around, so the next step is more taxes.

> Why don't hire them to be workers in the school

I've got a family member that actually does that. She drives the school bus in the mornings and evenings, and works in the cafeteria during the day.

>> The schools don't have tons of money just sitting around, so the next step is more taxes.

In a world where communities are experimenting with Universal Basic Income (UBI - which I also think is a sorely broken concept) to redistribute excess wealth to citizens just for breathing, I don't understand how the next step towards funding actual work that we need accomplished is to increase taxes.

The existing funding just needs to be channeled better to the right places. So, I think the next step is actually electing/highering better managers of school funding.

It's a very small minority of communities that are experimenting with UBI, and even less of them doing so with tax dollars as opposed to some kind of charity or otherwise funded study.

I agree our spending is out of whack, but the programs I'd like to see cut for funding bus drivers are the same ones the folks demanding we cut taxes insist we must keep bathing in money, not the ones aimed at helping people get out of poverty. So given no one is willing to give up their preferred programs, raising taxes seems like the only option if we want to keep transporting kids to school.

School districts have no money to spare. Due to wealth inequality, the fruits of prosperity are accumulating somewhere inaccessible.

The average school in America spends almost $16,000 per student per year. In some cities like Baltimore, it's over $20,000 per student annually.

How much of that is spend on sports facilities?

I can't imagine (outside of Texas) its very high at all. Most elementary schools dont have anything besides a basic field and gym and the cost per them is usually slightly higher than high school.

The biggest increases in expenditures are specialists for children with speech problems, reading problems, learning disabilities etc. as professions like speech language pathologists usually earn considerably more than teachers and the number of them within any school has increased considerable too. I'm not making a value judgement - that's just where the money is going.

> The biggest increases in expenditures are

Purchased services (janitorial, professional development, etc.) Staff costs, including teachers, administrators, and specialists, are up only slightly per student (down as a share of total) over time, as are supplies.

Is the increase in child speech and reading problems due in part to the breakdown of family structures and the corresponding absense or regular family meals together (with conversation) and family reading aloud? Those would be significant handicaps to learning speech and reading if the child doesn't receive good role modeling at home.

Does anyone know of socioeconomic studies that look for correlations between family stability/duration and rates of speech/language pathologies?

> Is the increase in child speech and reading problems

_Is_ there such an increase? The GP comment says that use of speech pathologists increased, not that this was due to an increase in kids with these problems. My assumption was just that we're serving these kids better, where in the past they'd be less likely to be identified and helped.

You state that as a damning statistic and my gut reaction was that it seemed high to me too. But what is a reasonable amount to spend per student? Beyond a gut reaction of that feeling like too much in reality I have no idea. An extremely simple divide by 365 comes out at $43 a day. When presented like that it doesn’t seem totally insane.

To just have them in child care, no education, for a year is $12,000-ish. It doesn't sound so crazy that educating them would cost a little more.

https://www.epi.org/child-care-costs-in-the-united-states/#/...

Average teacher salary is about $50k per year.

Average student:teacher ratio is 16:1 (this feels low, but I got it from here: https://www.publicschoolreview.com/average-student-teacher-r...)

So those $16k * 16 = $256k which can pay for about 5 full time teachers, which feels like it's in the right ballpark. 1 full time teacher, 1-2 part time assistants, and the rest peanut buttered across admin, other support staff and benefits.

Also facilities, materials (which teachers often buy out of pocket right now) and other services like lunch and busing.

Students with disabilities and other problems also need to be taken care of, and often this costs significantly more. One way private schools save money is by simply kicking these kids out.

School is mostly a daycare, and only a little about education.

It seems kind of crazy that for that amount, you could hire excellent full-time private tutors at a 4:1 student to teacher ratio. I know a number of parents who felt that their kids got a much better educational experience through COVID "pods" thanks to the drastically smaller class size, but they had to pay for it out of pocket. But since it appears to cost the same amount, why not offer that as a publicly funded option?

You are paying for education, transportation, and food. Are you sure privatizing that is a comparable price tag? I would like to see some evidence.

With the COVID pods, parents would handle food (often not provided by public schools anyways), transportation, and providing a location to teach. From talking to people in those situations though, the main cost was by far the tutor or instructor. Dropping the kids off or loaning out your dining room is pretty trivial compared to $1-2k per child per month in tutoring fees.

Again though, I suggested adding it as a publicly funded option, not making it mandatory. If parents preferred a traditional school, they could do that instead. My point was that we could support alternative models like this with existing public funding, and it would benefit the children who perform better in a small classroom environment.

The annual cost cited earlier is not referring to COVID pods, so I would like evidence that the cost is comparable long-term.

Okay, taking Baltimore as an example, if you have a pod with five children, that's a total budget of $100k for the year. From some quick googling, Baltimore teachers have an average salary of just over $60k, but let's make it say $80k for a tutor to include the value of teacher benefits. That leaves a $20k cushion for food, field trips, classroom supplies, etc.

This basic structure is something that homeschoolers have been doing for decades as well, with $0 government assistance. In that case, you typically have a co-op arrangement where the parents share teaching duties for a small group of children. It's difficult but possible, and government funding would go a long way towards making those sorts of models accessible to more families. Right now it virtually requires a parent working part-time, which is something a lot of households struggle to afford.

Quality private tutors for only 64k salary?

I had the Baltimore number of $20k cited above in mind, which would be $80k per year. Or a 5:1 ratio with $16k per year would also work out to $80k per year for the tutor. My point is that a pod-like structure would be financially viable with equivalent government funding. You can quibble over the "excellent" part I suppose, but that is on par or better than comparable teacher salaries in most of the country. Also I'd imagine it's a lot more pleasant to teach 4-5 students than 25-30.

I'm intrigued by this option but also doubtful. If the going rate for a high quality tutor to teach 4 now is $43/student a day or approximately ~$21/hour assuming an 8 hour day (I'll take this at face value, I have no way of verifying it), what does the cost become when the demand goes up due to doing this for every student across the country? Essentially this means multiplying our teaching staff by roughly ~8x. Also what qualifications does a "high quality tutor" have vs a teacher? Does this including learning supplies, books, computers, etc?

It also doesn't seem like it answers the question of where this teaching happens or how the students get there. Our current classrooms definitely aren't set up for this.

In many countries kids walk to school.

And walk home for lunch.

That's not going to fly in a sprawling suburban school district in Minnesota.

Parents will need to drive their own kids to school then. No different than consumers who can’t or won’t pay exorbitant fees to have groceries or takeout delivered.

> Parents will need to drive their own kids to school then.

So is the school day going to get longer or the work day shorter? Or do all households now all need two parents with only one working?

If there’s no funding to raise pay for bus drivers causing a shortage, it’s possible all of the above to assemble some semblance of a school day. Maybe some kids drop out of school entirely if there’s no transportation and parents can’t provide it. Inelastic demand that exceeds supply results in shortages.

“This fall, the shortage became dire enough that Steele’s old route — the one where she knew all the kids well enough to take them to their doorsteps when needed — was consolidated out of existence. In October, the district told parents that 12 routes probably wouldn’t be staffed this year. Steele was transferred to a different route with new kids, and sometimes the chaos of route changes and late buses meant she also had to drive kids home from other, equally unfamiliar routes.”

According to federal safety standards, the children will be safer in the car with seatbelts, rather than the school bus without seatbelts.

Who would want to transport children on busses when the safety devices are purposefully missing?

In most places in the U.S., city planners have engineered that to be impossible.

According to Google Maps my high school was 13.9 miles from my house

Sure, I'm Spanish, I did that.

The walk to anywhere my education happened until I was 18 was took 10 minutes. after that, when I went to college, I had a bus stop about 200 meters from my house that got me there in another 30-40 minutes depending on traffic and such. I didn't finish college and pursued a different kind of higher education degree, that was about a 15 min ride via subway, the stop being less than 3 min away from my home. Then a different one of the same kind, which was a 15 min walk from my home.

My impression is that numbers like this are not at all the usual in the US, I will concede that the area in which I live is pretty well connected, but to be clear, these aren't crazy numbers by any measure.

Another datapoint: North Sweden middle of nowhere:

Class 1 - 9 Walk/bike to school 5 minutes.

Class 10 - 12 Regular buss ride 45 minutes one way.

University either continue same buss ride or move to student appartment and do 5 minutes walks again.

Where I live we don't even have sidewalks in large amounts of the city, let alone crossings, and heavy snow for three~ months of the year.

With high enough population density and near-by schools these ideas could work, but the US is very spotty and way way too car-centric for this to be a turn-key solution.

My wife grew up in Canada. She walked in the snow. 1.5 km. My kids charter school has no bus. There best friends are home schooled. And we are thinking of switching to that.

Obviously not viable everywhere. But there are alternatives

Your alternative relies on a parent being able to not work, that isn't an alternative for many households (least of all single-parent ones).

Agreed. US cities generally have way less population densities than European cities. Basically, the New York City metro and perhaps Chicago (mostly within the El, but perhaps more broadly if we include the commuter rail lines) are the main cities I can think of where public transit makes good economic sense. Most other cities are heavily subsidized and still underused. Hence school buses rather thank kids taking transit to school.

I experienced this as a foreign exchange student… and it permanently ruined me. There’s just no way for me to recreate this experience for my kids, but I am glad that our school district is working hard to put locally grown produce on lunch trays, even if I’d rather have the kids walk home for lunch. It just isn’t a practical model for most American families where parents work outside the home and often with long commutes. Am glad more people are working from home - maybe this model will someday be practical.

Or they use public transport: Kid me in Germany had a daily 30 minute public bus commute from primary school to day care, and about a similar commute back from there to home.

Secondary school was a 30 minute subway commute to it, and back from it, 5 times a week.

Not much has changed about that in the decades since; To this day one of the most crowded times in German public transport is right after school ends at 1 PM.

Indeed: https://savvytokyo.com/preparing-your-child-to-walk-to-schoo...

My daughter will start kindergarten next fall here in the US; she’ll walk to school through elementary school (500 meters) and middle school (800 meters). Not walking to school is not an “American” thing, it’s a “suburb” thing.

In my 35,000 person city, we’re facing real school budget issues due in parent to shifting population. Our superintendent is a smart guy and has made a number of moves to help maintain buildings and services. One of his first moves was to better optimize the bus routes, which was claimed to save $400K / year. Unfortunately the true outcome was that more parents gave in and started driving their kids to school because the bus service is now so crappy.

I just now remember a presentation about how hard it is for public schools to save money. Just one of the many examples was busing.

Apparently, staggering schedules is obvious low hanging fruit. Instead of all the schools starting at (roughy) the same time, break it up into 1/3rds. Eliminates need for 2/3rds of buses and drivers. Employ remaining drivers near full time. Win, win, win.

Proposal is floated on a regular basis. Broadly popular with parents in the strictly hypothetical sense.

And then most every parent loses their frikkin minds once the details become more concrete.

So administrators recoil from the shit storm. And we're stuck with 3 times the number of buses and drivers than is actually needed with a more rational schedule.

The problem in my case is that my kids would need to be at the bus stop an hour before school, when school is less than two miles away. Makes more sense for me to let them sleep a bit more, have a proper breakfast, and then take the 15 minutes to get them there and on with my day. Given the number of cars in front of the school, I think a lot of parents are making the same choice.

Totally. I no longer have a pie in this food fight. I would just like for all the belligerents to understand that difficult choices have been made. And then calm down.

Decades of wage stagnation finally catching up to society

Wage stagnation would mean wages in the past buy the same things now.

If people have in the past lived on X, why could they not live exactly the same now on X?

A lot has changed. It's not just wage stagnation and inflation, but consumption habits and jobs have changed too.

Many things are cheaper or free now. YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, etc. provide hours of entertainment for "free". Streaming music, etc.

70'' tvs are cheap, ad supported.

Clothing is cheaper. Disposable electronics and garbage products cheaper.

Durable physical goods, tools, and food are more costly. Cars. Houses. Things of value and craftsmanship.

Total compensation has risen with labor based productivity just fine.

For context:

> The remaining 37 percent of per-pupil spending [1] covers everything from school administration, transportation, food services and facility operations. [2]

[1] In 2019 total per-pupil spending in Minnesota was approximately USD 14 000, so USD 5 180 was available per-pupil for these non-classroom items, including transportation.

[2] https://www.twincities.com/2019/10/27/heres-where-minnesota-...

There isn’t much managing on a bus when you are driving. And one kid is not a lot of difference than 18. Is a highly scalable problem, unlike teaching.

I'm trained as a bus driver.

I quit after my first day because driving without kids and driving with kids was so different that I was no longer confident in my ability to drive safely without more training (which the district was not willing to provide).

It doesn't sound hard, but it is.

What's the difference between driving with and without kids?

I can only speak to twins, and they're toddlers and not old enough to be on a bus, but... My driving ability rapidly deteriorates when they decide it's time to start arguing / fighting with each other, or myself, or when they're just screaming about whatever it is they decide they want to scream about, or when they're having a "problem" and are demanding help, etc.

I've accidentally rolled stop signs, I've accidentally crossed lanes, I forget my blinker. It's all of the hallmarks of distracted driving. It's not constant, in fact it's rare, but then I only have 2 in the car with me and it only takes once for an accident.

We have very long conversations now about why it's bad to distract the driver before we get in the car and start the engine. It's helping, slowly.

I cannot imagine doing it for a living.

The sibling comment to this one is absolutely correct that the root cause is distraction, but I'm going to elaborate on that.

* Noise. The inside of a school bus is very noisy, even with quiet kids. During the particular route I was on when I decided I needed more training (I accidentally hit a pickup truck mirror with mine; no damage because it just folded inward), I was taking the sweetest, quietest elementary school kids. And yet, the inside of the bus was loud because some of them were talking. (Note that I still had a trainer with me when I had that accident; I was that green.)

* Movement. You can see basically all of the kids in the big mirror above the windshield. Humans, like most animals, have evolved eyes and a brain that focus on movement, mostly to avoid being eaten by predators. While okay on the savanna, in a bus, this means your eye is constantly drawn to the big mirror, taking your eyes off the road. In the aforementioned accident I had, my eyes were drawn to the mirror at the wrong time as well.

* Task saturation. [1] If you haven't heard of it, follow that link. But basically, when learning to drive a bus, I could focus entirely on the bus, which does require your full attention. Your trainer usually tells you where to go, so you don't even need to think about navigation. When adding kids, you now have to think about navigation (following the route), and hitting the correct bus stops. Hitting the stops also isn't just a matter of stopping at the right place; you have to activate the lights early, meaning you have to think ahead.

* Communication. In aviation, there are three things you must do, from most to least important: aviate (fly the plane), navigate, communicate. For buses, it's drive the bus, navigate, and communicate. Communication is about handling the radio to other buses and dispatch, as well as getting on the intercom if necessary.

* Thinking ahead. In addition to all of that, to drive a bus correctly, you always need to be thinking about 15-20 seconds ahead. You need to see a green light 1/4 of a mile ahead of you and anticipate that it will turn yellow. You need to watch the traffic ahead of you to anticipate problems because you can't slow down as quickly as they can, etc. Trying to do that without distraction is hard. Doing that with distraction can easily cause you to lose all of the context about it when a distraction steals your attention for just a moment.

There might be more, but that's all I can think of at the moment. I hope it answers your question.

[1]: https://nbaa.org/aircraft-operations/safety/task-saturation-...

Everything? It's like a pilot on a sim v. real life with 300+ people/"souls"...

This feels like a leftist propaganda article. There are thousands of jobs that none of us can imagine doing because we don't understand what it actually takes.

Looking at it, driving a school bus does not seem to be any harder than driving any other bus, or truck. Does not seem to be harder than cutting up chicken, doing roadwork, cleaning a chimney, baking bread. What is with trying to paint school bus driving as some special kind of hardship.

If anything it seems easier and more pleasing than the other jobs I mentioned.

You get a ton of time off, all school breaks and summers, and you only have to work for a specific few hours a day. You get a sense of satisfaction getting kids to school and home, you get to see people, talk to some. There is direct feedback and shows you the value of your work. Why does it matter how many tons the bus is? You don't need to lift that.

If you want to make some part time money, driving a school bus seems a lot more fun and more entertaining than a lot of other jobs.

If there is a bus driver shortage then that is because the people that used to drive the school bus (retired and part time workers) don't want to do it anymore. But reasons are not explored or explained at all. Hence we learn nothing of the real reasons that we have a school bus shortage.

In my opinion drivers are afraid of catching COVID from the kids, so it is not a problem that raising the pay would address.

I'm all for decrying leftist propaganda, but if you think driving a massive vehicle while a bunch of screaming kids get up to god-knowns-what behind you is "fun and entertaining" you probably need your head examined.

you talk like someone that never seen a school bus, let alone been on one

I have, in the past, pre-covid, most people that drove the bus seemed content, happy to do so, cheerful, getting kids on and off a bus seemed a enjoyable time for everyone. Plus I've talked to many bus drivers, none seemed to indicate any trouble.

Painting the job as something terrifying is absurd and lines up with the absurdity of the paper:

"oh my GOD! Kids .... we all know kids are evil ... kids plus 15 tons of a vehicle ... ohhh it must be terrifying"

"Calling kids hard to deal with is...

Shuffles deck, pulls card

Leftist propaganda!"

I can't speak to your experience, but my bus driver of many years was a cranky old woman that frequently had to yell at kids to knock something off.

I'm not sure if her being cranky was a cause or effect of the yelling.

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