1)Imagine a job that you arrrive at before dawn but don't get done with until late afternoon. But you only get paid for 3-4 hours of work. There's a reason I tell people that it can be a great second job if your first job is flexible. But it can really suck if you don't have that...and most people don't.
2)Most jobs work and pay for 250 days. Bus drivers, because of the school year, only work about 180 days. This is OK if it's not your prime source of income or like a lot of days off. But if you need to work like 99% of the population, this is sub-optimal.
3)School districts, even the wealthy ones, don't want to pay bus drivers as it is not one of their core prcoesses. If they wanted to pay us what the market really bears, we'd make a lot...but if I wanted to go drive for private industry and be a unionized delivery driver, I could likely make twice what I'm being paid now (and work full-time as well).
4)Bus drivers have to have a Commercial Drivers' License (CDL), and they are not easy to get. I have multiple endorsements (student, passenger, air brakes) on top of the license as well. DMVs don't make it easy to pass the test, and since we have random drug tests, bi-annual physicals, and can easily lose our license for various infractions, it's not always easy to keep them for some people.
5)This coming week I will be out in the dark starting my bus in temperatures in the teens. This comes only a few weeks after doing afternoon routes in 100+ temperatures on buses that are not air conditioned. Not only is this not the most comfortable thing in the world, for people with certain health conditions this can be dangerous.
6)Oh, speaking of working conditions, my old school district has most of its routes on terribly maintained dirt roads that went from being extra dusty to extra soaked. As a rookie driver I got stuck in the mud multiple times. But what is worse is the daily vibration of those roads, which I think took some years off of my life.
7)Even on good roads, the buses we drive are not all that reliable. When they are being shaken apart by bad roads, it feels like it's a daily gamble to drive and hope that something does break off it. I've driven several types and brands of buses over the year, and the one thing that they all have in common is that if they were regular car brands they would be considered lemons; the breakdown rates on these buses is astronomical. Occasionally somebody I will hear somebody say they want to buy an old school bus and fix it up. I always tell them that this is stupid...not only are you buying a 25-year old vehicle that has been abused (and probably not well-maintained in the past five years due to budget issues), it was probably not well-built to begin with.
8)Then there's the problem of driving a semi-sized vehicle through small neighborhoods, trying to squeeze through cars parked on both sides of the road and vehicles pulling out in front of me and children running out into the street. A colleague of mine hit and killed a child who had done such a thing several months ago. This driver was at fault in no way...but the guilt she feels will stay with her the rest of her life.
9)Ah, the kids. When I tell people what I do most people say, "Oh, I couldn't do that!" Yep, you probably couldn't. Everyday on my current route I drive 50 hyperactive middle school kids (main ingredients: snark, anxiety, hormones, and energy drinks) to and from school. Now that I've driven them for awhile and have gotten to know them I know most of them are OK. But kids, even good ones, by nature will test adult authority. And that's why a lot of adults can't do this, because they are too insecure in themselves to have a hundred eyes on them at all times. Once you built relationships and trust with the kids, this can get easier...but even a good bus will have a few knuckleheads on it.
10)Far worse than the kids are the adults in school administration. Since I started driving every once in awhile clueless school administrators will come and try to suck up to drivers, and one of the time-tested line they use is, "The job you do is so important...it's like you are in charge of a classroom on wheels." When I hear that, I know they've never been on a bus, because a)school teachers can actually see their students, not just in rear-view mirrors and b)we're not actually teaching them anything...buses are only classrooms in that the kids are learning about life (good and bad) from each other. Drivers have no idea what goes on with the kids when they sink down below the seats.
11)There are some school administrations who will occasionally recognize that transportation is not in their skill set, so they farm their bus services out to independent contractors. I've never worked for one, and don't want to, but sometimes I think they can't be more clueless than educational administrators who talk about desired outcomes and assessments. Real-world problems, like how to finish an afternoon drop off while arriving at a school at the same time to take a volleyball team to another town, are things they have no clue about.
12)Finally, being a bus driver means that you have to deal sometimes with other bus drivers. And most bus drivers are...different. Maybe it's the strange hours, the PTSD of dealing with future psychopaths, or any of a hundred other reasons. But do this long enough and it will change you, and not always for the better.
So after all these points, why do I keep doing it? Because I'm one of the few people for whom most of these obstacles are not deal-breakers. My first job is flexible. I get along well with most people. I don't go running with minor problems to clueless administrators who think they know my job better than me. I'm healthy enough that extreme heat and cold are not problems (yet).
Who knows how many more years I will do this job part-time. But I fear that somehow it may well become a dying industry. If they can't ever create enough drivers, maybe they'll figure out a better way. I'm guessing that 20 years from now my grandkids will go to school on buses run by UPS or Amazon.
