GUILDERLAND — As the nation continues to suffer from a dearth of school bus drivers, David Dwyer, who drives for Guilderland, had some ideas to share with the school board on Tuesday.

He suggested changes in the bonus system, and speculated that the district could attract younger drivers by paying for child care.

Dwyer said that the former, now vacated, district office — once a golf club on the Farnsworth Middle School property — would make a good daycare center.

A $3,000 bonus for new drivers, just learning, is “cool,” said Dwyer but he suggested drivers with two or three years of experience should get more.

“Everyone else is doing $3,000 so you don’t want to lose it,” said Dwyer. “What I’m suggesting is that we have a regular $3,000 for new drivers and then we have a $5,000 for drivers who have two years or more of experience.”

He suggested awarding $1,000 after 60 days and the rest after one year.

Currently, he said, drivers get trained and then, once they get their Commercial Driver’s License, or CDL, they move on.

On daycare, Dwyer suggested paying $5,000 directly to a vendor. This would help attract younger drivers, he said.

For many current Guilderland drivers, Dwyer said, this is a second career. “I was a mechanic,” he said. “This is my second career. So, when I reach 65, I can retire.”

He said of providing daycare, “Nobody around here has done that, and it will open a lot of eyes. People will say, ‘Wait, they’re willing to do this.’”

He concluded, “We need that next generation.”

School board President Seema Rivera called Dwyer’s ideas “creative” and asked about a committee working on bus-driver recruitment.

Assistant Superintendent for Business Andrew Van Alstyne said he was working with a group that has discussed ideas similar to Dwyer’s.

He told The Enterprise on Friday that talks have involved union representatives and transportation leadership. The group is concerned as much with retention as recruitment, he said.

“We don’t have enough drivers, but we also want to keep the drivers we have because we have excellent drivers,” said Van Alstyne.

The district regularly hears “touching stories” from parents who appreciate drivers who go “above and beyond” their driving duties. He cited one about a “kid who was having a bad day” but “lit up when they saw the bus driver.”

“So we want to keep our existing drivers and bring in new drivers,” he said.

All of Guilderland’s in-district routes — the routes serve three levels: for the five elementary schools, the middle school, and the high school — are covered by school employees, Van Alstyne said.

However, while district employees used to cover all routes, now Guilderland contracts out for trips to venues for special-education programs, for students who are homeless or foster children, and for parentally placed private schools, Van Alstye said.

The pandemic led to a rapid increase of those contracted routes.

“I know that there were challenges before 2020 and then things only really accelerated after that,” said Van Alstyne.

“It was tough on everyone,” he said of the pandemic. “The school bus drivers were on the front lines of this. So they were picking up kids. They were trying to manage social distancing and keep themselves safe as well. So it was, I think, a stressful experience for transportation workers.”

According to research by the Economic Policy Institute, reported by the National Education Association, school bus driver employment continues to be far below pre-pandemic levels. There were approximately 192,400 bus drivers working in K–12 schools in September 2023, down about 15 percent from September 2019.

Although the pandemic emergency has ended, the Economic Policy Institute report found that school bus drivers are still sharply affected by the pandemic’s fallout. School bus drivers tend to be significantly older than the typical worker and their wages are far lower than most other workers, according to the institute’s analysis of Current Population Survey microdata.  

In 2021, over 72 percent of state and local government school bus drivers were age 50 and older, compared with 38 percent of state and local government employees and 31 percent of private-sector workers, the report found. The age makeup of the school bus driver workforce made them more vulnerable to the effects of COVID, contributing to workers leaving the profession and being reluctant to return.

Nationally, roughly half of school children rely on bus services to get to school. Interrupted services and instability can disrupt learning time and contribute to absenteeism, the Economic Policy Institute reported. 

At Guilderland, the vast majority of students are bused to school; only Pine Bush Elementary and Altamont Elementary schools have a few students who walk to school, Van Alstyne said.

Guilderland not only has bonuses for new drivers but also awards small bonuses for drivers who bring in new drivers. New drivers who are fully licensed get a larger bonus, he said, than new drivers who have to be trained.

To help ease the shortage, the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles this week announced it has implemented a federal waiver that allows school bus driver applicants to skip the engine-compartment component, also called the “under the hood” component, of the Commercial Driver’s License road test.

Asked if he thought doing away with the under-the-hood requirement for a CDL would help Guilderland, Van Alstyne said, “I don’t think there will ever be a single solution that solves everything, but anything that can help will be appreciated.”

He said his group had not talked about a day-care option until Dwyer brought it up on Tuesday.

Calling Dwyer a “bus driver who is very committed to the district,” he said, “I really appreciate him coming in and sharing; it was a very genuine effort to help.”

Although Guilderland has a tiered system — unlike, say, rural Berne-Knox-Westerlo, where a bus brings students in kindergarten through 12th grade to a single campus — there are still shifts with holes in the middle of the day, said Van Alstyne.

“We have the option so people can have that middle of the day free,” he said. “There are some people who work in other roles in the district in between the morning and afternoon shifts, and there are some people who drive in the morning and have the middle of the day [free] and then drive in the afternoon.”

Van Alstyne concluded that Guilderland is “trying to get the word out” that “we have good drivers. The people who drive for us like driving for us. We want people to join us because it’s a positive experience to work with the kids.”

Another question

Dwyer told the school board that he had one more question, as a parent. He asked if the school had a requirement to teach life skills.

Rivera responded that a business class at Guilderland High School taught personal finance.

Teaching financial literacy has been discussed by the board before, she said, adding, “I’m a big supporter of that.”

Dwyer mentioned that some states require schools to teach such courses.

Currently a bill in the New York State Assembly, still in committee, would require high schools to provide a course in financial literacy and require students to complete such a course as a condition of graduation.

A similar bill in the State Senate is also still in committee. The bill states, “The course will be taught on a pass or fail basis and shall not affect the student's grade point average.”

Seven states — Alabama, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, Utah, and Virginia — earned an A grade on a  “report card” from the Center for Financial Literacy at Champlain College in Vermont because they require students to take a semester-long personal finance course.

New York state got a B grade, earning “extra credit” for having 11 financial literacy education bills introduced in the New York State Legislature in 2023. “Some of these bills, if passed, would require a stand-alone course (or its equivalent) in personal finance as a graduation requirement,” the report card said.