School BUSRide spoke with David Shaw, transportation services supervisor for Palliser School Division in Canada. He discussed his district’s biggest challenges and creative solutions, his experience as an NAPT members, and his thoughts on the organization’s recent live events.
Please introduce yourself and tell us about your district.
I am the transportation supervisor for Palliser School Division in Southern Alberta, Canada. We are a rural division that operates 60 bus routes and transport around 1,800 students to schools within our division.
What is the most pressing challenge for your district’s transportation department?
This is the same issue that just about everyone is dealing with at the moment, getting bus drivers to fill the seats. With the training programs that the province put in place a few years back, it became a little more difficult but we have managed to stay on top of it. We are a training school within the province of Alberta, and we have had some good luck getting people to come in and train and become school bus drivers. I think once we get them in the door, we have had better luck keeping them.
How are you seeking to solve this challenge?
With the driver issue, once you do get them, you have to make sure that the pay is equitable. We have been lucky enough to be able to do that. There is certainly enough work for somebody looking to become a school bus driver but because it is not a full-time job, you have to make sure that it works within their availability and the pay is equitable enough that they stay on board. The latest budget from the Alberta government has reflected that need and they have actually increased funding in addition to increasing some of the costs of training and the actual training pay for drivers in training schools. I think we are definitely in a better place now than we were last year at this time.
As a seasoned professional, what advice can you offer other NAPT members?
Basically, what it comes down to is making sure that you follow all of your state and provincial regulations when it comes to training, you reach out to people within your divisions and your areas and lean on, not only some of your teacher EAs, but also lean on the general public that have students within your division. Let people know that driving a school bus is a good way to make some extra money and a good way to ensure that we can get all of our students to school.
What can the NAPT organization do to best help you?
I attended one of the Road Shows last year in Nashville and I thought that was a very good event and it had the ability to get people from the same type of rural or urban or metro setting together and talk about the issues at hand. That was a good event. I will be attending the upcoming event in October in Columbus. I find that there is a lot of good guest speakers that have some great ideas when it comes down to recruitment and retention, and I think that is probably where we need to continue to see the NAPT lead, to come up with those different types of ideas that people can incorporate and take and move forward with. That type of networking and collaboration of ideas is always really helpful.