> 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
Uh, pay the drivers more than $37 a year, that wage is a joke anywhere in the US
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Does anyone know of socioeconomic studies that look for correlations between family stability/duration and rates of speech/language pathologies?
_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.
https://www.epi.org/child-care-costs-in-the-united-states/#/...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And walk home for lunch.
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?
“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.”
Who would want to transport children on busses when the safety devices are purposefully missing?
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.
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.
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.
Obviously not viable everywhere. But there are alternatives
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.