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Comment by dangle1 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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