QUESTION: Did Alamance-Burlington school bus drivers go on strike last week? If not, why were so many bus drivers absent from work on Wednesday, December 4?
ANSWER: Like many North Carolina public school systems, ABSS has faced an ongoing shortage of school bus drivers for years. But the approximately 20 bus drivers who were absent from work last Wednesday, December 4, were out due to illness – not because of a strike, according to ABSS chief communications officer Emily-Lynn Adkins.
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“I know we had some [bus drivers] call in sick,” Adkins told The Alamance News Monday morning. “There was no strike. We were able to reroute buses, and everybody reported [to work] on Thursday. There was no official representative that came to us; we had a number of people who called out sick.”
For her part, school board chairman Sandy Ellington-Graves said in a separate interview that ABSS superintendent Dr. Aaron Fleming had alerted the board about the bus drivers’ absences early Wednesday morning.
“Dr. Fleming alerted the board that we were short 20 drivers,” Ellington-Graves told the newspaper Monday morning. “My understanding is there were a handful who were already [scheduled to be] off. So Wednesday was really tough on [the transportation department].
“When you’ve got 20 who call in sick on a given day and you’re already short, that presents a huge issue,” the school board chairman said. “I’m not privy to what reasons were given; I just know we were short 20 drivers. All of the zones except Western were impacted; Graham had the highest [number of absences].”
Adkins told the newspaper Monday that ABSS has 130 bus routes and approximately 30 vacant bus driver positions, reflecting a vacancy rate of approximately 22 percent.
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Given the financial strain that ABSS officials say the school system faces in the current and upcoming fiscal years, partly due to the expiration of federal stimulus funding for Covid-19 on September 30, 2024 – and with North Carolina being an at-will employment (non-union) state – there would likely be few avenues to resolve a strike among any faction of the more than 2,400 ABSS employees.
Data from the state Department of Instruction (D{I) reveals that 8,348 students – or 38.2 percent of the 21,833 students enrolled in ABSS schools at the end of the first month of the previous, 2023-24 school year – relied on one of the 133 school buses to get to and from school. The cost per bus was $43,946.46; per student, $718.07; and the cost per mile was $3.32 to provide school bus transportation for ABSS students in 2023-24, the most recent period for which the costs are available, according to DPI”s annual public schools statistical profile.
Widespread bus driver shortages
At least one other nearby public school system is taking drastic measures to deal with what state and federal education officials describe as a nationwide shortage of school bus drivers.
Durham public schools recently announced that, due to a shortage of drivers, it will suspend transportation to and from school for one day per week, through December 20. Families will be responsible for transporting their children to and from school one day per week, which will be the same day each week for each bus route.
Starting in January 2025, Durham public schools also will limit bus service to elementary school students who live one mile or more from school and establish “express stops” (centralized locations for drop-offs and pickups) for three magnet schools serving middle and high school students, multiple media outlets have reported.
Last Monday, school bus drivers in the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County school system did stage a protest – resulting in several dozen drivers calling out and disrupting bus transportation for approximately 45 schools – to demand better pay, communication, and safety. However, that school system’s “Bus Driver Advocacy Group” did not characterize the protest as a strike.
ABSS has struggled with school bus driver shortages for years – despite offering financial incentives such as a $1,000 signing bonus; a $50 monthly bonus for perfect work attendance; providing “extra duty” pay for existing school employees who agree to drive a bus; and raising hourly pay rates for bus drivers from upwards of $15 per hour to approximately $20 per hour, effective July 1, 2021. ABSS officials later reported that those financial incentives had done little to help fill vacant bus driver positions.
Other compensation concerns
Meanwhile, Ellington-Graves told the newspaper that she’s receiving other complaints about employee compensation, which she said appear to be unrelated to the bus drivers’ absences from work last Wednesday.
Earlier last week, the school system’s administration sent all ABSS employees an email, notifying them that certified K-12 teachers and certified “instructional support” staff would receive a $1,419 state-funded bonus with their December paychecks. That bonus is funded by a “low-wealth” supplement for certain school systems included in the state budget, most recently the biennial budget passed by the General Assembly in September 2023.
The low-wealth supplemental funding is intended to help public school systems recruit and retain teachers, as well as provide parity between larger, wealthier school systems (which don’t receive low-wealth funding) and poorer and/or rural school systems, according to the state Department of Public Instruction (DPI).
“The challenge is, the way it has always been paid, everybody doesn’t get it,” Ellington-Graves said of the low wealth supplement. “Bus drivers are classified employees [i.e., those whose jobs don’t require a degree and/or state certification as a prerequisite for employment] and unfortunately are not included in the state’s distribution.” The school board chairman said most of the employees who’ve contacted her are certified pre-K teachers, not bus drivers.
“I think some of our employees are extremely disheartened because they were not included in the state’s distribution,” Ellington-Graves explained. “There are guidelines that have to be followed. We are doing our best to distribute the funds as expected, keeping in mind that the state [restricts eligibility for the low-wealth supplement to certified K-12 teachers and instructional support employees]…Obviously, all of our employees are integral to ABSS.”
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