US grapples with Covid-era bus driver shortages as schools reopen; ‘Teachers should be priority group for Covid jabs’

WASHINGTON: It’s back to school time in America after a year of remote learning, but forget about the iconic yellow school bus: because of Covid, there is a shortage of drivers.

The problem -- among other issues -- is that some drivers oppose mask-wearing mandates, and others, who are older and do this kind work after retiring from other jobs, are worried about catching the virus while driving kids around, education officials said.

The Minneapolis area of Minnesota, for instance, has warned that school bus service this year will be sporadic because of what it called a driver shortage being faced by school districts around the country.

"Minneapolis Public Schools is encouraging families who can transport their students to school on their own to do so," the local school district said. And one private school in Wilmington, Delaware, the hometown of President Joe Biden, is offering parents $700 a year to drive their kids to school.

Back to school days are not uniform across the country; some kids resumed class in late July and others will not do so until September. Because of the transportation problem some districts, like the schools in Pittsburgh, have given kids two weeks of extra vacation while they try to sort out the bus issue. There, officials still need to find bus seats for 5,000 children.

School bus drivers have been in short supply for some time in the United States, but the pandemic has made things worse. Greg Jackson, director of transportation for Jeffco school district in Colorado, said his area has a lot of retirement-age drivers who are particularly vulnerable to the virus and thus worried about returning to work.

Others oppose the district’s policy of having drivers wear masks, he said, "so they didn’t come back." "We lost a few folks just recently because of that," Jackson said. Across the country school officials are bending over backwards to get kids back to school with their classmates and teachers after all these months of trying to study and learn at home.

School office workers are being recruited to drive buses, for instance, bus routes are being extended to get more kids aboard and bus stops are being reorganised.

Waiting lists for bus service are now sometimes very long. To lure people to work as bus drivers, salaries are being raised and signing bonuses of up to $4,000 are being offered.

Since the start of the pandemic the bus driver workforce has dwindled by one-quarter, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says. Job recruiting sites now feature some 5,000 positions for school bus drivers, which is nearly double the pre-pandemic figure, Julia Pollak, an economist with ziprecruiter.com, told AFP.

"The average school bus driver’s salary is about $34k per year, or $16 per hour. It is precisely in this pay bracket that employers are reporting the greatest difficulties filling vacancies, due to concerns about workplace health and safety, childcare barriers, and the financial cushion provided by Covid relief and stimulus spending," Pollak said. Indeed, school bus drivers are not the only people in demand, as many US employers say they are having trouble hiring people in lower paying positions.

Even after people are hired as school bus drivers, it is not a done deal, said Jackson. After the new recruits are trained to drive a bus, there is the risk they will take their brand new certification to the higher-paying private sector, he said. "It happened a lot," he said.

Meanwhile, teachers and school staff should be among the groups prioritised for Covid-19 vaccinations so that schools in Europe and Central Asia can stay open, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Unicef said on Monday.

Measures to ensure that schools can stay open throughout the pandemic "include offering teachers and other school staff the Covid-19 vaccine as part of target population groups in national vaccination plans," the UN agencies wrote in a statement.

The recommendation, already made by a group of WHO experts in November 2020 before the vaccination roll-out, should be done "while ensuring vaccination of vulnerable populations," the statement said.

As schools reopen after the summer holidays, the agencies said it was "vital that classroom-based learning continue uninterrupted," despite the spread of the more contagious Delta variant of the virus.

"This is of paramount importance for children’s education, mental health and social skills, for schools to help equip our children to be happy and productive members of society," the director of the WHO European region, Hans Kluge, said in the statement.

In a related development, around 7,000 people protested in Athens on Monday against a new rule obliging health workers to get vaccinated against Covid-19, said police who fired teargas to quell violence among the demonstrators.

The rule change, which came into effect on Wednesday requires that all personnel working in hospitals be vaccinated. The demonstrators waved Greek flags and brandished placards declaring: "We are not against vaccines, but against fascism" and "Long live democracy".

"It’s amazing that I’m put on sick leave because I refuse to be vaccinated when for months I have helped to contain the epidemic, I have worked in very difficult conditions", said Christos Bakakios, an ambulance driver who joined the protest. A nurse, who gave her name as Lina, said: "The Greek health system will collapse if they put all the caregivers who refuse to be vaccinated on furlough."