ST. LOUIS — Starting Monday, nearly 3,500 students across St. Louis cannot take the bus to school for at least two weeks because of a driver shortage.
Bus service will be suspended for six high schools — Central, Collegiate, Gateway, Roosevelt, Sumner and Vashon — and two elementary schools — Mallinckrodt and Wheeler (formerly Kennard), St. Louis Public Schools Superintendent Kelvin Adams said Monday.
Transportation has long been a challenge at SLPS and school districts nationwide, but an ongoing staffing crisis has intensified during the pandemic.
Recruiting new drivers is challenging because of “low pay, early retirement, COVID-19 concerns, low morale and more attractive driving jobs in the private sector,” according to HopSkipDrive, which tracks school bus issues.
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Last fall, students in Granite City had to take Madison County Transit when the school district could not provide bus rides due to the driver shortage. The director of Lift for Life charter school in St. Louis earned a commercial driver’s license and drove the bus at the beginning of the 2021-22 school year.
Missouri Central, in its first year of a contract with SLPS, needs to hire 25 more drivers to cover the 16,500 students who take the bus to 58 schools across the city. The company pays drivers $25 per hour, with a five-hour daily minimum.
Students in the affected high schools can receive MetroLink bus passes. Elementary students can attend before care at the schools for free. Families can also receive weekly $75 gas station gift cards on Fridays if the student has perfect attendance.
Students with special needs will still be provided bus transportation, and the district will continue to use taxi companies in some cases, Adams said. Earlier this year, SLPS switched from First Student bus company to Missouri Central because of frequent delays and no-shows. Changing companies did not contribute to the crisis, Adams said Monday at a news conference.
In an email to parents Monday, Adams wrote, “We are asking for your help in getting through the first few weeks of school while we do all we can to soften the blow of what is clearly an inconvenience.”
The schools were chosen primarily for the number of bus routes they serve, Adams said. Mallinckrodt and Wheeler are gifted magnet elementary schools with the lowest poverty rates in the district.
Magnet schools can serve up to 28 bus routes picking up students across the city, while neighborhood schools need about five or six routes in a smaller radius, Adams said.
Other school districts are also making changes because of the bus driver shortage. Fox School District in Jefferson County is short 13 bus drivers this fall. Bus stops were eliminated within 1 mile of elementary schools and 2 miles of middle and high schools in the district. Parkway School District also reduced the number of bus routes, and elementary students living within a mile of their school will no longer be provided transportation.
“The decision to limit bus service is not based on the district’s finances,” Fox Superintendent Paul Fregeau wrote this month in a letter to parents. “We just do not have enough drivers. This is the unfortunate reality we are facing, along with many school districts in our area and across the country.”
