By JAN LARSON McLAUGHLIN
BG Independent News
After meeting for more than three hours in executive session Monday afternoon, the Bowling Green Board of Education voted to offer $2,000 signing bonuses to anyone completing their bus driving certifications and necessary endorsements.
The goal is to get enough drivers to continue offering bus transportation for any interested students living more than one mile from their school.
In July, the school board voted to provide busing for students in an extended two-mile radius. That means the number of students eligible for bus transportation will be cut in half – from 2,122 to 1,024, according to district transportation director Toby Snow.
“We’re all concerned with what this does to families,” Superintendent Francis Scruci said after Monday’s meeting.
“The board acknowledged that we have a real issue with a lack of bus drivers,” he said.
All area school districts are struggling to attract and retain enough bus drivers. However, Bowling Green is the only one so far to extend its pickup radius to two miles.
It is also the district that covers the largest geographic area in the county – 118 square miles.
“The size of our district presents challenges,” Scruci said.
“Some of their routes are an hour long,” Board President Jill Carr said. Smaller districts have much shorter routes that appeal to drivers. “That plays a part of it.”
Last year, Bowling Green limped along with too few bus drivers and regular route cancellations. And it doesn’t look any better for the beginning of the new year, with the district having 11 of the necessary 20 drivers to cover all the routes using the one-mile radius limit.
So the district will start the school year using the two-mile radius. Districts are not allowed to increase the radius during the school year, but they can return to the one-mile radius during the year if more drivers are hired, Scruci explained.
The problem isn’t the pay, Snow said last month, with Bowling Green drivers’ pay recently being increased $3 an hour to $19.85 an hour, which is average for this area. Districts offering $22 an hour also can’t find enough drivers, Snow stressed.
The signing bonuses approved on Monday will be split into three payments over the first year, Carr said.
For the last half of the school year, Bowling Green was forced to cancel two bus routes each day. Even using the district’s mechanics, courier, transportation director and secretary to drive routes, the district is still down four drivers, Snow said last month.
By limiting bus transportation to students two miles or more from schools, the district can cut its bus routes from 20 to 14. Even at that, that district will still be three drivers short, Snow said.
“We need to do this to stay in compliance,” he told the board last month, explaining that the district is required to provide bus transportation to students more than two miles from school.
One family reportedly filed a complaint with the Ohio Department of Education in May over the route cancellations. A penalty could mean the loss of funding to the district, Scruci said.
