Photo by Jon Anderson
Hoover school buses sit outside Rocky Ridge Elementary School in Hoover, Alabama, on Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2023.
When Hoover students go outside to catch their buses to school this year, they’ll find the school buses aren’t stopping at each house like they have in many cases in the past.
This year, buses will pick up students at neighborhood bus stops spread out across the neighborhoods in an effort to save time on the bus routes, Transportation Director Jeremy Bradford said.
With bus drivers hard to find, the Hoover school district is having more drivers drive double routes, Bradford said. That means time efficiency is important.
Hoover schools this year will have 116 buses driving 202 routes, Bradford said. That means 86 of those drivers will have to do double routes, which is up from 48 double routes in the 2021-22 school year, Bradford said.
His goal is to get back up to 138 bus drivers, like the district had in the 2021-22 school year, but many school districts are having a hard time attracting drivers, he said.
In an effort to better attract drivers and decrease absenteeism, the transportation department has increased the pay for drivers and aides who exceed 20 hours per week, increased substitute driver pay from $60 to $90 per day, offered a referral fee for school system employees, offered a perfect attendance bonus for transportation employees and offered a half-route option (for someone that only wants to drive only mornings or only afternoons) that includes health insurance benefits.
The department also provides free in-house training and is in the process of adding air conditioning to all its buses.
Two years ago, none of the regular education buses had air conditioning, Bradford said. Now, only about 20 buses don’t have air conditioning and within about two weeks, that number will be down to 16, he said. In October, when the next batch of new buses are set to arrive, only six or seven buses will be left without air conditioning, but it could take a year to 18 months to get the final batch of new buses with air conditioning due to backlogs on school bus orders, Bradford said.
As of last year, the Hoover school system’s 116 buses were going a combined 6,945 miles every day, and they were expected to arrive at 4,858 stops within a 10-minute window, Bradford said.
The number of students riding Hoover buses has dropped since the COVID-19 pandemic hit. In the 2019-20 school year, there were 7,456 students riding buses, but that fell to 6,633 in 2020-21 and 4,889 in 2021-22. This past school year, the number of students riding the bus climbed back up to 5,316.
Bradford said it will be interesting to see how the numbers shape up this year. School officials in late April started spreading the word that there could be changes with transportation for the 2023-24 school year.
Initially, there was some thought to having large bus stops for an entire community, but school officials decided it would be too difficult to manage large numbers of children at one stop, so they scaled back the plan to multiple stops within neighborhoods, Bradford said.
He hasn’t heard many complaints yet, but the first day of school for Hoover City Schools doesn’t arrive until Thursday, Aug. 10.
For information on how to apply to become a bus driver for Hoover City Schools, go to hoovercityschools.net/Domain/31.
