As if 2021 hasn’t had enough drama with the Covid situation and people trying to get back to doing things in person – including going to school. We’ve seen all kinds of supplychain and labor issues in the broader marketplace. Well now the labor shortage has reached a critical point for Greenville County Schools. Yesterday GCS sent out communications about the bus driver shortage and asked for parents to contact the district to let them know if they can drive their own kids to school. They said that they were short over 100 bus drivers and they can’t do all the routes. So parents are asked to carpool together to help get their kids to school. It seems the district will need to redraw the bus routes for the existing bus drivers that they do have.
I don’t know why there is such a shortage of bus drivers this year? I could guess. Perhaps with all the scaremongering over Covid, maybe the people who normally drive buses don’t want to expose themselves potentially to getting Covid or the Delta variant. Maybe they don’t want to have to wear a mask? Maybe they don’t want to have to ask each child that gets on the bus without a mask if they would like a mask. Maybe it just doesn’t pay enough.
In South Carolina, it’s my understanding that the state of SC owns the buses but the school districts need to furnish the drivers. Last week Molly Spearman, State Superintendent of Schools, issued a mask mandate for all school children riding state owned school buses. The one caviat is that if the student is not wearing a mask and refuses to put on the mask offered by the bus driver that the student must still be allowed to ride the bus – maskless. BTW, somehow the school districts are not allowed to issue schoolwide or systemwide mask mandates because it is prohibited by law in South Carolina now at least for the 2021-2022 school year.
Based upon the communications that I saw, this would seem to me to be the permanent state of affairs this year for business in the Greenville County Schools system. I hope I’m wrong and that they can find people to take these jobs but given the challenges many employers are having these days finding qualified candidates, I’m not holding out hope.