(NewsNation) — As school districts across the country deal with a shortage of bus drivers, some have turned to paying parents to transport kids to and from school.
One Wisconsin school district is taking it a step further, actively recruiting and hiring parents to be its bus drivers.
East Troy Community School District in southeast Wisconsin had struggled for years with bus driver shortages even before the pandemic, which made driver recruitment much harder across the country, said Rachel Neubauer, who leads the transportation department for the school district.
At times, it had to combine routes or even ask staff like the mechanic to do some driving.
But around 2021, the district came up with a solution to its perpetual shortages: recruiting the family members of students as bus drivers.
“We started emailing the parents, doing a mass mailing from our software system, saying hey, we want to keep providing great service, great bus driving, but we need your help,” Neubauer said.
Since administrators started the family recruitment strategy in 2021, they’ve managed to almost completely eliminate their bus driver shortages. There is currently one driver out of the workforce for an injury, but two other drivers are getting licensed to drive, so the district considers itself at capacity.
Around half of the 35 bus and van drivers the district currently employs are parents (and a few grandparents) of the students.
Neubauer said those who signed up were motivated by both a desire to support the community and to make extra money.
“They were either looking for a way to help out or looking for a way to fit a job in with their kids’ schedules. And being that we are basically around the kids’ schedule, that really works for them,” Neubauer said, noting that a few parents even take their preschool-aged kids along with them in car seats on the bus.
Neubauer did acknowledge that East Troy is a fairly small community. There are around 1,600 kids in the district and around 900 of them are transported on school buses. Family members in a tight-knit, small town may be more easily recruited as bus drivers than in a larger one.
But for East Troy, the community ended up being the solution.
“I think we’ve learned that really we have to focus on our community because that’s who supports us, anyway. So if we can ask them for help, draw on them, the community shows up for us,” Neubauer said.