Alamance-Burlington school officials have backtracked on their plans to ask the school board to adopt a policy that would’ve required classified employees – such as teacher’s assistants, cafeteria workers, and office workers – to obtain a commercial driver’s license and drive a school bus if necessary.
The so-called “dual employment policy” that ABSS officials had presented to school board members this spring had been intended as a stopgap measure to cover bus routes due to a longstanding shortage of school bus drivers.
ABSS superintendent Dr. Aaron Fleming told school board members during their latest meeting that the proposed dual employment policy listed on their meeting agenda would not be presented for a vote.
“Between the new funding we received from the commissioners, which we are very appreciative of, I don’t know that we necessarily need to move forward on dual employment at this time,” Fleming told the board.
Alamance County’s commissioners agreed during a special joint meeting with the school board on Friday, June 20 to allocate an additional $4 million to ABSS for the 2025-26 fiscal year.
The county budget request that school board members approved in March had included $1.1 million to provide a new supplement for classified employees – who include bus drivers, child nutrition workers, and other staff whose positions don’t require state licensure and are typically paid on an hourly basis –on top of the state-funded portion of their pay.
The supplement for classified employees would start at $1,000 for those who have up to five years’ experience within the state retirement system and would increase by $100 increments for each five additional years of employment before topping out at $1,500 for classified employees with 26 years’ or more experience, as structured within the county budget request for 2025-26 that ABSS forwarded to Alamance County government officials at the end of March.
School officials, however, have said since the special joint meeting with the commissioners on June 20 that the classified supplement amounts may need to be adjusted – and presented at a future school board meeting – since ABSS hadn’t received all of the funding it had requested for the 2025-26. (The commissioners agreed to allocate 91 percent, or $71.5 million, of the school system’s $78.6 million county funding request.)
Fleming told the board that he wants to make sure his administration has done all it could before asking the school board to consider adopting a policy requiring classified staff to drive a bus. “I do believe the classified supplement will help us, so I want to give that a try,” he said last Monday night.
The dual employment policy would’ve required ABSS classified employees to become licensed to drive a bus and to perform duties of a bus driver as a condition of their employment, though there was a possibility of exemption “in extraordinary cases,” based on the initial draft that was presented to the school board in April. Whether the proposed policy would’ve applied retroactively to existing classified employees wasn’t settled during an initial discussion this spring.
Though the proposed dual employment policy wasn’t presented for a vote, several speakers warned school board members last week about the potential ramifications of requiring classified employees to drive school buses.
“I chose to be a bus driver,” said Karen Slade, who retired from her 25-year career with ABSS in June 2022. “In trying to employ people in dual positions to drive a bus, you’re asking not to have any employees.”
Slade told The Alamance News before the June 23 school board meeting started began that she had started working for ABSS, at Turrentine Middle School, in 1998 and got her commercial driver’s license (CDL) in 1999 with the approval of her-then principal, Ronnie Wall. “I drove a bus for 24 of my 25 years with ABSS,” said Slade, who later served as a teacher’s assistant and bus driver at Southern High School.
Being responsible for the 48 to 55 children who ride a bus is stressful for some people, some of whom won’t be able to handle it, Slade later said during the public comments portion of the school board’s meeting. “You’re not going to have anybody working for you; they’re going to choose their sanity and peace over you telling them [they] have to do it.”
Jack Worley, an Exceptional Children’s teacher at Eastern High School, warned that ABSS would whittle the field of prospective applicants for classified positions (such as teacher assistants and bus drivers) that are already demanding and difficult to fill without having to do both simultaneously. “I cannot imagine what it would be like if you were to take these two positions and try to make them into this mishmash,” said Worley.
Tasha Miles, a secretary for the student services department at Southeast High School, also warned the board last week that the dual employment policy would shrink the applicant pool for classified positions. “This will lead to an even more severe staffing shortage,” she said. “We understand the challenges faced by our school system in filling vacant positions [and] would support other approaches such as a pilot offering additional financial incentives. Some current employees are thinking about resigning if it passes.”
School board chairman Sandy Ellington-Graves said later in the meeting, “Thank you, Dr. Fleming, for putting that on hold to see [if] we can [fill school bus driver vacancies] in a different way.”
ABSS currently needs about 30 school bus drivers to cover approximately 130 routes for the upcoming school year that begins August 25, according to the school system’s transportation director Justin Smith. Work schedules for school bus drivers fluctuate according to which school zone they drive a bus for and whether they drive multiple routes, Smith said.
School bus drivers who work 20 hours per week are eligible for partial benefits; those who work 30 hours or more are eligible for full benefits, i.e., similar to those that all state employees receive, Smith subsequently confirmed for The Alamance News. The current starting pay for bus drivers with no experience is $17.47 per hour, but the rate could increase once a state budget is passed, he told the newspaper.
