'Just untenable': MCCSC school bus woes spark concerns for students, staff, parents

Sep. 13—In the midst of the ongoing pandemic, a driver shortage and more than 2,000 additional students riding school buses compared with last school year are causing transportation issues for the Monroe County Community School Corp.

More than a month into the school year, many parents say students are arriving at school late or getting home an hour or more after the school day ends. With bus driver shortages, current drivers are running multiple routes and parents aren't getting timely notifications.

It's caused some parents to coordinate carpooling or to drive their children to school themselves, but as that option gains popularity for the families with the means to do so, drop-off and pick-up lines for personal vehicles are getting lengthier as well.

Ashlie Kehrberg has children in kindergarten, first, fourth and sixth grades at Unionville Elementary School. She said her children have gotten to school late when the bus driver didn't pick them up until 9 a.m. due to having to run multiple routes.

One time, her children didn't get home until about 6 p.m. She described herself as a split parent — she knows there are parents who are incredibly frustrated and angry, but said her heart goes out to bus drivers.

"We are in a situation of late buses, don't know what time they're coming," Kehrberg said. "But I'm hearing the backstory from a bus driver that we know and I know how incredibly difficult it is right now for them."

Ashley Inselman has a child at University Elementary School, a child at Tri-North Middle School and two at Bloomington High School North. She said while buses are coming later than anticipated in the morning, the bigger issue is the time it takes for her children to get home.

In the morning, buses pick up older children first since school starts earlier for middle and high schoolers. That means the younger children are the ones who suffer and don't get to school on time, Inselman said. In the afternoon, buses returning students home have very regularly been more than an hour late, Inselman said.

"When we've heard that the bus was going to be like an hour late, we have the luxury of being able to just get in the car and go pick them up," Inselman said. "But I really feel for other parents who don't have the means to be able to do that. "

Inselman said for the first week or so of the school year, her family gave school transportation a chance.

"It was just untenable," Inselman said. "And we kind of kept hoping it would get better, but it never has. It's still ridiculously late every day. And I feel bad even for the school principal and administrators — they can't go home, either. They can't do anything. They end up being babysitters for these kids."

An Aug. 11 letter to MCCSC families said 99% of students returned to in-person learning this year and the number of student bus riders increased by approximately 2,700.

"You have to social distance right after you get off the bus and you have to pack them because there's no buses," Kehrberg said. "And can you imagine a packed bus and the driver is trying to be as chill as possible? We want them to be safe. There's just a lot of distraction and stress that the bus drivers are having."

Andrea Mobley, assistant superintendent of human resources and operations, told The Herald-Times a few weeks ago that the district currently employs more than 100 bus drivers. Transportation supervisors, maintenance staff and mechanics with commercial driver's licenses drive bus routes when necessary, Mobley told the H-T.

The district has acknowledged a shortage, and bus drivers aren't the only positions MCCSC is looking to fill. At the August school board meeting, Jeff Hauswald, MCCSC superintendent, said the district is short 14 drivers for existing routes. Posts on social media by MCCSC bus drivers and parents who know bus drivers have said that's closer to 40.

MCCSC bus driver positions posted list pay as $18.83 to $22.15 per hour, based on years of experience.

MCCSC did not respond to requests for interviews for this story by deadline.

Kehrberg knows a bus driver who was going to retire in spring 2021 after driving for 45 years. "MCCSC begged her basically to come back," Kehrberg said, and she did.

Kehrberg said she knows there are bus driver shortages across Indiana and the United States, but pointed out the district had several months to figure something out.

"They've known of the situation, pleading with people, 'Please, please don't leave us, we'll do anything for you. We're desperate," Kehrberg said of MCCSC.

According to a new nationwide survey, half of student-transportation coordinators described their school bus driver shortages as either "severe" or "desperate." The survey was conducted by the National Association for Pupil Transportation, the National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation Services and the National School Transportation Association. The survey got nearly 1,500 responses.

MCCSC uses a web and mobile app called Here Comes the Bus. It's supposed to be a way for parents or guardians to track the location of a bus in real time, but parents say it's not reliable.

Mary Harris has a daughter at Rogers Elementary School and said she attempted to use the app years ago. It didn't go well. After using the app several different times, she still never got updates and gave up on using it. The app has never worked, Kehrberg said.

The first week of school, there was no communication about delayed buses, Inselman said, but now, she gets a text, email or robocall about when a bus will be substituted for another bus or to expect a delay. But the problem has not been resolved.

"I do want to be clear that I have no fault with the bus drivers," Inselman said. "I feel terribly sorry for them. Our bus driver is wonderful. I mean, she'll even text me and say, 'You may want to pick up your child. I'm running double shifts and they're holding me up and I'm going to be an hour late.' She'll text me and tell me from wherever she's stopped."

Kehrberg also said she gets updates directly from her children's bus driver. She gets notifications via phone call, text and email all at the same time for the district, but there have been instances where by the time the notifications come, her children are already on the bus or they've been expecting the bus at 8 a.m. and have already been waiting for the bus for 15 minutes when they get a notification the bus won't come until 8:30. She wishes there was more notice earlier in the morning when the district knows a bus driver will be doing multiple routes.

"Even if it said, 'Your bus is going to be late,' it's better than finding out hey, she's going to be late and 10 minutes later she comes," Kehrberg said. "That's not a whole lot of planning."

At 12:30 p.m. Tuesday in the MCCSC Co-Lab, the MCCSC board will have a special meeting that could address some of the communication issues. On the agenda is a five-year contract with Tyler Technologies, the district's existing transportation software vendor, for purchase and implementation of various software systems. The total five-year cost of the agreement and hardware purchase is $875,700 and will be paid from the elementary and secondary school emergency relief fund.

In the meantime, Kehrberg feels disheartened, thinks bus drivers should be shown respect and doesn't want more drivers to quit.

"Unionville is a rural area and we do have some long bus routes, but they are pushed to the brink right now with having two and three routes and the bus drivers aren't getting home until seven," she said.

Some bus drivers have families to get home to or have second jobs they need to be at, Kehrberg said. The bus drivers the district does have should be respected, she said, even though the children, too, are being worn down from the delays and are just getting back to some normalcy of in-person school, Kehrberg said.

"When my four kids got home at 6 p.m., they were tired, they were hungry, they were aggravated," Keherberg said. It also meant her son had to eat dinner in the car that evening since getting home at that time caused him to be late to an extracurricular activity.

Inselman's high schoolers have sports after school, so they don't take the bus home, and her child at Tri-North doesn't get home for more than an hour after school is over because drivers are running such long routes due to lack of drivers. Inselman said her children don't want to ride the bus because it takes so long.

"It's basically unpaid child care after school gets out," Inselman said. "Why sign up for after school care if you know your bus is always going to be an hour and a half late? So the kids are pretty annoyed with it as well."

Parents like Inselman and Kehrberg say carpooling has been discouraged or not allowed due to the pandemic. Inselman and two other University Elementary moms now carpool and are careful to wear masks.

"Nobody's ever questioned our carpool in terms of picking up kids that are not my own, nobody's ever even questioned it, so I'm not sure that that's being policed," Inselman said.

Inselman said picking up students at University used to be a quick and easy process. But now as more parents pick up their children, it takes a minimum of 30 minutes, she said. Inselman and another of the "minivan moms" work full time.

"Because I'm salaried, I can work my schedule around inconveniences like this," Inselman said. "It just means I need to work more hours in the morning or more hours in the afternoon or evening when they come home, but I don't know how someone that had to punch a clock would be able to do this."

Inselman said she would definitely have her children ride the bus — like they did all of last year — if the service was consistent.

Kehrberg's husband works full time from home and she has school and other obligations, so she said they have had to just let their children be late. Kehberg was already nervous about her kindergartner going to school, and there have been times her children got home at 5:30 p.m. or later. Kehrberg said her kindergartner was falling asleep in the bus seat. After that, Kehrberg or her husband have sometimes picked their children up after school.

Sometimes the pickup line at Unionville has almost stretched to North Brummetts Creek Road, she said.

Harris has seen the bus drop off children around 5:15 — an hour and a half after school ends. Her daughter is in the extended day program after school, meaning she doesn't ride the bus home. Harris said she wouldn't want her on the bus that long.

But this school year in the morning, the bus has been mostly consistent with when it arrives, Harris said — except one day when it didn't show up altogether. Harris' husband was able to take their daughter to school that day.

"I think if it happened again and again, it would be more of an issue," Harris said. "I was like, there's so much stuff going on right now and I might not even hear back, so I didn't reach out."

The children who do ride the bus home can't play outside to get out their energy. They have to stay in their socially distanced space they've been allocated on the floor, Inselman said, without knowing when the bus will come.

"It's ridiculous the amount of time that it takes," Inselman said. "It takes away from learning, it takes away from parents being able to work, it makes the kids anxious. They've been sitting all day, trying not to be too wiggly or too noisy and now they have to sit and wait for a bus to come which takes forever or even just their parents to go through the long line to pick up their kid."

Inselman said her husband wanted to write to the superintendent to ask him to come to school, be with children until the bus actually comes in the afternoon, then get on the bus and ride it with them.

"If you can imagine kids that got up at seven o'clock in the morning and now they're not even getting to go home until 5:30 and they're tired and they're hungry and they're cranky and they're getting in trouble, let's let the school superintendent ride with them," Inselman said.

Contact Emily Cox at 812-331-4243, ecox@heraldt.com or follow @HT_InSchool on Twitter.

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