Broward County Public Schools is running against the clock to hire enough school bus drivers before the first day of school.
The district is currently 100 drivers short, which impacts how many transportation routes are available to students and timeliness for pick up and drop off.
Simone Clowers, executive director of Student Transportation and Fleet Services at BCPS, says they’re not going to meet the deadline to hire 100 drivers before the school year starts in three weeks.
However, "anything helps," she said. If they hire 10, 20 or even 30 drivers before then, that's "hope on the horizon, like light at the end of the tunnel."
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The shortage is mostly due to a lack of applicants for the position, which pays $21 an hour. The current minimum wage in Florida is $15 an hour.
Broward school officials said about two dozen bus drivers recently lost their Temporary Protective Status, or TPS, effectively losing permission to work in the U.S. As a result, they could not be rehired by the district, or anywhere else.
The Trump administration has aggressively moved to end TPS for more than 1 million immigrants nationwide from more than a dozen countries, such as Haiti, Venezuela, Syria, and Somalia. Florida is home to about 400,000 TPS holders, mostly from Venezuela and Haiti.
The shortage of bus drivers is more "concerning" than in previous years, when the district has been 30 to 60 drivers short, because of school closures, consolidations and repurposing, Clowers said.
One of the backup plans is to add more routes per driver, Clowers said.
" So pick up one set [of students] and then go back and get another. That's always our plan B," she said. Another option would be to have " relief operators to cover routes."
Anyone who would like to apply to become a bus driver can do so on the district website.
