School districts across Vermont struggle to find, retain bus drivers

When the Peacham School lost its bus route last November due to a bus driver shortage, Principal Samuel McLeod was in a quandary.

The Caledonia County K-7 school has about 70 students and most of them depend on a contracted bus service that runs a 30-mile rural route. The bus, only one, also helps out neighboring communities like Barnett and Danville, and takes Peacham students on a variety of field trips, from science outings to skiing.

“The immediate reaction was advertising locally and trying to get anyone in our community to sign up to take on that job,” McLeod said.

But there were no takers. So McLeod, 46, decided to take matters literally into his own hands. He signed up to get a commercial driver’s license — it took about a month — and grabbed the wheel.

“To not be able to go on those field trips was not an option — and that was one of my primary motivations for getting the license,” he said, adding that he had never driven a bus before.

McLeod is still at it. On Tuesday morning, he drove the yellow bus and picked up students for the first day of school this year.

“I think one of the most exciting things in my day is seeing them first thing in the morning. The sun’s barely up and they’re smiling, and they get on the bus, they’re excited to see me and they’re excited to go to school,” McLeod said. “Honestly, that’s amazing.”

Across the state, several school districts are again struggling to find bus drivers to pick and drop students in the new school year.

“This is a significant issue for us, as it impacts our ability to provide timely transportation for our students,” said Superintendent Karen Conroy from the St. Johnsbury single-school school district, which serves more than 600 students, in an email.

Consolidating routes

Both Peacham’s Caledonia Central Supervisory Union and St. Johnsbury school districts contract with Butler’s Bus Service, a company that owns a fleet of more than 300 buses and serves Vermont and New Hampshire. But Butler’s is unable to provide all the drivers needed due to a statewide driver shortage, school officials said. This often leads to delays and disruptions in bus schedules, said Conroy, who is being forced to adapt by using one bus for two routes.

“This approach helps us maximize the use of available resources and minimize disruptions for students and their families,” she wrote.

Facing similar staffing challenges, the Mount Mansfield Unified Union School District has also consolidated routes. The district that serves about 2,600 students in eight schools in eastern Chittenden County is down one full-time and two part-time drivers, according to Superintendent John Alberghini.

Three years ago the North Country Supervisory Union, with 12 schools, in the northern Northeast Kingdom had eight bus drivers but two of them retired, said Superintendent Elaine Collins in an email.

“We have definitely compressed routes, which has been very complex at the high school since we transport students from across all sites,” she said. For sports and field trips, the district has had to contract with a private company and that, she said, has been “quite expensive.”

“We’ve been slowly rebuilding, but it has been a struggle, for sure,” Collins said.

Bus companies said it’s hard to recruit drivers for a job that requires a lot of responsibility for not a lot of pay.

Mountain Transit, which serves 87 school bus routes mostly in Chittenden and Grand Isle counties, currently has about 100 drivers, but needs 20 more to reach full capacity.

“We always have vacancies and always have room for more, especially with after school extracurriculars and sports,” said Paul Clancy, the company’s terminal manager.

“It’s a labor issue”

Clancy attributes the lack of applicants to the high cost of living and the ongoing housing crisis in Vermont. Although Mountain Transit offers a 5% market rate increase every year, many of his drivers have moved to neighboring states, he said.

To address the shortage of four drivers in its district, the South Burlington school board recently approved a significant raise, as reported by The Other Paper. Aside from implementing a referral bonus of $1,000 in the 2025 school year, bus drivers in South Burlington can make about $33 to $42 per hour, depending on their experience level.

This has led to a flurry of new applications and phone calls, according to Jean-Marie Clark, the district’s director of operations. She received five applications last week, had a previous driver return, and has candidates interested in the district’s training program.

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“Going from a permitted driver to fully licensed can take a month or many months, depending on the employee,” Clark wrote in an email. “We are excited to add these folks to our team, but recognize it is not an immediate solution. We are also bolstering our on site training program by bringing one of our retired drivers back in as a trainer for our new employees.”

The Champlain Valley School District — the largest in Vermont with more than 4,000 students — maintains its own transportation department and is one of few to be fully staffed this year, with 45 drivers.

That’s because they have long valued their drivers and compensated them well, said
Gary Marckres, the district’s chief operations officer. New drivers aside, the district pays experienced bus drivers about $35-39 per hour.

“We have been a leader in recognizing that the market requires fair compensation if we’re going to be attractive to people who have commercial driver’s licenses because there’s a high demand (for them) over different industries,” he said.

Emo Chynoweth has been in the busing business for 34 years as the vice president of Butler’s Bus Service. He said the driver shortage has always been cyclical.

“I think the cycle is opening up. It’s not worse, but it’s not getting a lot better,” he said.

While bus driving is a part-time job and historically hard to fill, he thinks it’s a labor problem that’s affecting many other industries in the region — from teaching to hospitality.

“Everybody is short, not just bus drivers,” Chynoweth said, adding that he sees ‘wanted’ signs all over Vermont. “I wish I had a magic button that could solve it. Until we can figure out how to increase the labor force within our environment, it’s going to continue to be an issue.”

Registered in Vermont, the company serves about 38 school districts in Vermont and New Hampshire and is currently 20 to 30 drivers short. Pay varies by contract but Chynoweth estimates the average salary ranges from $20 to $24 per hour for most drivers.

He does not, however, think the vacancies are related to salary. “​​We’re paying an average of $30 an hour in our Springfield operation and we’re two drivers short. So that tells me right there that it’s not a wage issue,” he said.

Creative measures

Winooski’s school district, one of Vermont’s geographically smallest covering a little more than a mile, found a creative solution to fill the bus driver demand a couple years ago.

Affected by the gap in service, immigrant parents in the state’s most diverse city signed up to be bus drivers in 2022. The school district collaborated with Mountain Transit and the Department of Motor Vehicles to get the volunteers quickly licensed.

Three of its five routes are still being driven by parents and the district is one driver short this year, according to Sarah Haven, director of finance and operations in the K-12 district which operates three schools and serves about 780 students.

“We’re very thankful for our bus drivers. It’s a hard thing to find. I know a lot of districts are struggling with it,” she said.

Meanwhile, Superintendent Matthew Foster at the Caledonia Central Supervisory Union is pleased to have two unique workarounds —- a principal who stepped up to drive a bus and a custodian who had once been a bus driver but let his license lapse. The custodian recently completed training and has been hired as a new bus driver.

“I think we’re in a better position than we were three weeks ago,” Foster said. “It’s such a fragile system for us right now. Any little bump throws us into a tizzy.”

Driver jobs have always been hard ones to fill, especially in a difficult economy, said Foster, who was formerly a facility and transportation director. And driving 20 to 40 kids in a heavy vehicle over several miles, sometimes in bad weather, can make for a challenging and stressful job.

“You know, it takes a special person to be a bus driver just as it takes a special person to be a teacher,” he said.

But the way his staff has been stepping up, he said, is an indication of how much they care about the students.

Meanwhile, picking and dropping children safely home has been “one of the most fulfilling experiences” he has had in education, said McLeod, the Peacham principal and bus driver.  He also believes in leading by doing, and said he doesn’t expect to give up driving the school bus any time soon.

“I’ve been in education for 24 years and I think we always have the mentality that we do whatever we need to do,” he said. “If we need to coach, we coach. If we need to clean, we clean. If we need to teach, we teach. If we need to drive and cook, we drive and cook.”

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