LAKELAND - Northern Lights Public Schools are rolling into the school year with enough bus drivers for the 2023-2024 school year.
This issue of having a sufficient number of bus drivers to fill the ranks was brought up and discussed during the most recent Northern Lights trustees meeting on Oct. 4 in Lac La Biche.
Nicole Garner, communications, and public relations manager for Northern Lights, said although there enough drivers to run the various routes, one route has remained vacant since the beginning of the school year. She continued by saying that officials are working with the contractor to secure a driver for that route.
And while a shortage of bus drivers isn’t an issue-at least for this year, spare drivers have been at a premium.
“Our main challenge at the moment is a lack of spare drivers to fill in for drivers who are sick, have appointments, or otherwise are unable to work for a period of time,” Garner told Lakeland This Week. “So, we have had several routes that have not had drivers for a day or two or sometimes longer because a driver is temporarily unavailable and there is not one available to fill in for them.”
The division contracts out most of the school bus routes but does have a few short routes that are operated from within the organization.
During Wednesday’s meeting, trustees and members of the executive also addressed related issues such as how to improve bus driver training and working with contractors to attract more drivers.
Local bus contractors have been seeing their own challenges when it comes to securing drivers.
The fact that being a bus driver is generally a part-time gig with drivers working split shifts in the morning and late afternoon has been a deterrent to recruiting drivers.
“You’re working a couple of hours in the morning to get kids to school and you’re working a couple of hours in the afternoon,” Garner stated, adding that some drivers need a second income which is a challenge to secure during non-driving hours. “So, we will sometimes not be able to recruit a driver for that reason, or lose drivers for that reason, or lose them to a full-time job…so it can be difficult to recruit.”
The school day schedule does work for many of the bus drivers who are retired or stay-at-home parents who can fit driving a bus into their schedules.
Also working in the favour of the school board’s driver recruitment plans is an up-tick in the speed to train new bus drivers.
In 2018, the Mandatory Entry Level Training Program (MELT), was instituted for Alberta drivers applying for Class 1 or Class 2 drivers’ licenses. A Class 1 license allows a person to drive all vehicles including semi-tractor trailer units. A Class 2 license is designated for school bus drivers. The MELT program was instituted by the Alberta government following the Humboldt Broncos crash in Saskatchewan that killed 16 people when a semi-truck ran a stop sign and crashed into a charter bus. Because the MELT Program has taken a considerable amount of time to train drivers, this past spring, the province eased some requirements for school bus drivers, along with reimbursing trainees for some of the costs incurred through taking their training.
“It is a little easier now to get them through the training and get them on the road,” Garner said. “So that has helped considerably.”
There are currently 92 bus routes identified on the NLPS online bus application.
The bus driver issues are not unique to Northern Lights, school divisions across the province are once again sounding the alarm as fewer and fewer school routes have dedicated bus services.
In the Lakeland Catholic School District, as of Sept. 28, four of the division’s 42 bus routes are not operating due to a lack of drivers – two in Cold Lake, one in Lac La Biche, and one in Waskatenau.
