Jacob Dimond / jake@yelmonline.com
Yelm Community Schools knows the challenges of growing its transportation department amidst a quadruple levy failure, and during the first joint meeting between the City of Yelm and the district in seven years, Chris Woods, superintendent, identified the issues currently faced with busing students to and from school.
According to Woods, transportation is a challenging issue — not just for YCS, but nationally. He said it’s especially difficult to hire drivers in Yelm due to a variety of different variables.
“When you think about the applicant pool that we draw from, people are not going to drive out to Yelm to drive a bus when they can pick any district within their neighborhood and get a job driving a bus,” Woods said. “When you think about our applicant pool, we’re talking about Yelm. Many of the people in Yelm go out of Yelm for work, for various jobs.”
Woods said the main issue is being able to hire enough drivers to transport students. He claimed that YCS is as competitive as it gets while comparing wages that drivers make in other districts, yet, the challenges still exist.
“When you don’t have enough drivers, you have to cancel routes,” Woods said. “Legally, we have to provide transportation to students with special needs. We have to. It’s the law. We do not legally have to provide transportation for gen-ed students. We do not have to provide transportation for them.”
Woods also identified the timeliness of training drivers, getting them through certifications in a timely manner and getting new drivers on the road. He said that’s another big challenge currently faced in the transportation department.
“We have two trainers within our staffing of drivers,” Woods said. “However, when you’re having to cancel routes, you don’t want to pull your driver trainer from routes so they can train drivers. So then you run into this dilemma — do we cancel more routes to get more drivers trained? Or do we keep those drivers driving and cancel fewer routes.”
On the flip side, Woods reported that YCS currently has several drivers who have completed their testing and certifications. They’re currently going on ride alongs with other bus drivers in the district.
Woods added that there are other drivers currently in the process of obtaining their commercial drivers license (CDL).
“It’s a long process to get a driver to come to us without a CDL through training and on the road,” he said. “The bottom line is it’s hard to find bus drivers. It’s a unique schedule. You’re working for a few hours in the morning, then you have a big gap during the day and you’re working a few hours in the afternoon.”
An additional challenge the district is facing in its transportation department has been the elimination of extracurricular bus routes. According to Woods, those routes would pay drivers an additional $10,000 to $15,000 as they continued to pick up those routes.
“We had to cut that because that’s covered by levy dollars, which we no longer have,” Woods said. “Right there, a bus driver is weighing their options of ‘do I drive in Yelm? Or do I drive in North Thurston, Bethel or Tumwater where I can pick up some extra routes and make some extra money?’ We don’t have the ability to offer that right now because of the fact we don’t have levy dollars.”
Woods stated the many factors that go into why YCS has to cancel bus routes includes a shortage of drivers, the length it takes to train and the ability to find trainers and drivers from outside of the district.
“A requirement to transport students with special needs will always come over transporting gen-ed students,” Woods said. “We believe that those walking routes can certainly help, because the more walking routes we can create the less bus routes we need.”
Yelm City Councilor Brian Hess asked the superintendent how the decision is made on which routes are going to be canceled? Woods told him that it’s all based on collective bargaining agreements (CBA).
“Anytime that we’re making adjustments to people’s work schedule, we’ve got to follow the collective bargaining agreement. That has implications as to who might be able to drive which route and how many hours they’re currently driving,” Woods said. “We try as best as we can to rotate the cancellations. For quite a while, we were not mandating that we pull drivers out from other routes. If I’m showing up every day, I’ve got my regular route and I’m showing up and I’m not absent. Those kids are getting picked up every day. In the beginning, what we were not doing was pulling that driver off of the route they were consistently driving and put them on another route that was having some absences.”
According to Woods, that’s since been changed and consistent drivers can be moved to other routes periodically in order to avoid repeat cancellations of the same routes.
