Wasting money on electric buses when what we need is school bus drivers.
Vermont has a school bus driver shortage. We have for years. Google “Vermont School Bus Driver Shortage” (as I did for this story), and the number of news hits you get is astounding. I was looking for “a” story I recently read and came across around thirty, spanning half a decade.
It’s a real problem. In one case down in Bennington, the public schools actually had to close for a period of time because they couldn’t get the kids from their homes to their buildings. (This is something the anti-school choice people say is an issue when parents choose independent schools, but the independent schools never seem to have this problem. Hmmm. Another story for another time….)
At the other end of the state, Essex/Westford kids have to spend over an hour and a half on the bus each way to school because there aren’t enough drivers to cover all the routes, which then must be combined into longer routes.
According to WCAX, “At one point, we had five rolling cancellations a day that were going through our system and just creates havoc on family schedules and all the way across the board,” said Brian Donahue, the chief operating officer of the Essex Westford School District…. Kids were not coming to school, and their parents and family were reporting, ‘Without a bus, my kid cannot get there.’”
Three hours a day sitting on a bus? To get to and from a school that’s less than ten miles from your house? This can’t be a healthy situation for young bodies or young minds.
So, when Vermont received over $18 million in a legal fraud settlement with Volkswagen, our erstwhile policymakers used a big chunk of that money to retain existing drivers and to attract and train new bus drivers to solve this real problem affecting children and families in a practical way.
BWAHAHAHAHA! Gotcha, didn’t I! No, of course, they didn’t. They blew the money on a pilot program to replace our existing diesel school buses with electric buses – for which we still don’t have enough drivers. Who cares about “the children” when you can pretend to be “saving the planet”?
Never mind that these electric busses don’t work particularly well in cold weather and in hilly terrain – or, in other words, Vermont during the nine months of the year school is in session – and occasionally just burst into flames. According to a report by VEIC, electric buses generally cost more than double the cost of a normal diesel bus, $330,000 to $350,000, as opposed to $125,000 to $150,000. In addition, the electric buses require between $15,000 and $30,000 in new charging infrastructure costs.
So, let’s just say if we simply bought new diesel buses – or kept the diesel buses we already have, assuming they don’t really need replacing — instead of buying new electric buses, the school district would have somewhere between an extra couple/few hundred grand – per bus – to spend on… I don’t know, training and hiring more bus drivers.
To be fair, policymakers aren’t entirely neglecting the bus driver issue. WCAX reports, “As of an April school board meeting, South Burlington will now pay around $23 an hour. According to the district website, Essex Westford School District pays around $20 an hour.” Seriously? This is what the salary was INCREASED to? What was it before, a crust of bread and a bowl of gruel at the end of the day? And you wonder why nobody wants this friggin’ job?!
Driving a vehicle that big is skilled labor under any circumstances. Doing it on Vermont roads while being simultaneously responsible for not a bunch of chickens but our most precious children – who, bless them, are probably more loud, unruly, and likely to do something stupid than a truckload of chickens – deserves a certain measure of hazard pay. Just for a little comparison, UPS full-time drivers recently won a contract raising their pay and benefits package from $145,000 per year to $170,000 for delivering bubble-wrapped toothbrushes in boxes big enough to hold a mini-fridge. Albeit, school bus drivers are not required to carry each kid from the bus stop to their doorstep, and UPS drivers don’t generally have the hours between 9 AM and 2 PM off.
Still, this is just another example of if you want practical solutions to real problems and a decent return on investment for our tax dollars, we need to usher in a new crop of political decision-makers in Vermont. The alternative is to be continuously thrown under the electric bus.
Rob Roper is a freelance writer with 20 years of experience in Vermont politics, including three years of service as chair of the Vermont Republican Party and nine years as President of the Ethan Allen Institute, Vermont’s free-market think tank. He is also a regular contributor to VermontGrok!