Get on the bus: Snoqualmie Valley School District needs bus drivers

Published 8:30 am Wednesday, May 25, 2016

This job has it all — part-time hours but enough to earn benefits, paid training, a pay scale that starts above $19 per hour, and its very own holiday. Look it up, Feb. 7 is, throughout the U.S., officially Pretend You’re a Bus Driver Day.

Despite all that driving a bus has going for it, the Snoqualmie Valley School District is struggling with a shortage of drivers now, and the problem could be worse by the start of the next school year.

“It’s a problem around the entire state,” said school district spokeswoman Carolyn Malcolm.

Jim Garhart agreed. He serves as the district’s director of transportation when he’s not out covering an open bus route, which is something he and his office staff are doing “every day,” right now.

“Every day my staff are driving,” he said.

Snoqualmie Valley School District has 58 drivers and only one substitute, covering transportation for more than 6,000 students each school day.

“We usually have seven or eight subs,” said Garhart.

Next year, he’s projecting the district will need about 70 drivers in all; that will include the routing for a new sixth elementary school on Snoqualmie Ridge, Garhart said, but those routes could actually be covered by existing drivers already. With 70 drivers, he said, he’ll be able to cover all of the routes and have a few subs.

To fill those 70 spots in an increasingly competitive market (Central Kitsap District recently reported that it was seeking 20 drivers) Garhart proposed the district’s first-ever career fair for classified employees May 10.

He hoped to attract people interested in the flexibility of the job, along with other benefits. “It’s a really great option for people who have kids in school, because they get the same vacations off,” he explained.

Karen Goldenberger, now in her 11th year as a driver, found the flexibility of the work to be most appealing. Driving two shifts of three hours each day left her with a four-hour gap in the early afternoons, just enough time for her to teach art at a local Montessori school.

“It was perfect,” she said.

Goldenberger, or K.G. as the other drivers call her, already loved being around children. The bus driver position, though, gave her a new way to see, and be seen, by her kids on the bus.

“They have this confidence in you,” she said, and sometimes shared their problems with her. “It’s a nice opportunity to help, to possibly plant a seed.”

Goldenberger joined the office staff a few years ago as a dispatcher, but hopes to keep that aspect of her work part-time because “I want to keep driving.”

For now, it seems she will be able to keep her bus routes, too. Turnout at the job fair was about 45 people, but most were interested in other classified positions available in the district.

Garhart isn’t discouraged just yet. He and his staff have begun discussing the possibilities for next year’s routing with a smaller number of drivers but haven’t made any formal plans so far. School district staff are also considering ways to adapt positions, allowing part-time employees to add other part-time roles that will allow them to earn benefits.

Malcolm said the district is working on ways to get word out to Valley residents about these more flexible positions, but also about the support in place for bus drivers.

“Training is paid,” she noted at $10 per hour, and the district will help pay for a portion of a bus driver’s Commercial Drivers License (CDL) permit, required to operate a school bus. Cost for the CDL varies with a driver’s existing endorsements, but ranges from about $150 to more than $200.

The cost of the license is cited as one possible reason that school districts around the state are struggling to fill drivers’ seats. Garhart allows the possibility of that, but is emphatic about another speculation, that the drop in available bus drivers is connected to the state’s 2012 legalization of marijuana.

“We do random (drug) testing here, and we haven’t seen that as a problem,” he said.

The CDL, though, is expensive, and not quick to get, and Garhart said, “when people are looking for jobs, they’re sometimes looking for an income right now.”

Not all of them, though. When Bruce Robinson applied to be a driver more than eight years ago, he was in search of a diversion. His own children were out of school and he’d taken early retirement from a construction management job, so “I got extremely bored,” he said.

Robinson started as a substitute driver, and subbed for nearly two years before he got his own route. “That’s unheard of today,” he said, with regret.

That extra training time as a substitute was invaluable, he said.

“You rode along with other drivers, you learned their personalities, how they talked to the kids,” he said.

He borrowed some of what he saw his trainers do, but created his own style of connecting to students on the bus, who quickly became “his” kids. “I dress up (in costume) a lot,” he explained, including as the Easter bunny before the mid-winter break, and as a “Star Wars” character for May 4.

“May the Fourth be with you,” he explained.

Groan. I forgot to ask what he wears on Feb. 7.

He also enjoys teasing his passengers, especially the middle-school boys who are young enough to still respect him, he says, but old enough to be skeptical of everything he says.

“That is the best part of the job,” he said, “messing with the kids.” But only he is allowed to do that. “Nobody else messes with my kids,” he said, more than once.

Robinson is about to retire — has actually put off retirement to the end of the school year, because he knows it’s going to be a hard transition for him.

“I love what I do,” he said. “I tell people this is the perfect job. You get to drive heavy equipment and you get to play with kids.”

The Snoqualmie Valley School District is now taking applications for bus drivers, in hopes of training applicants over the summer, to be ready to roll when the 2016-17 school year starts in August. Visit http://www.svsd410.org.