CENTRAL FLORIDA — Orange County and Osceola County school districts are both facing a critical bus driver shortage and especially on Good Friday.
What You Need To Know
- Parents have been warned to expect possible changes to commutes to school on Friday
- Osceola County officials suggest parents download an app to track their children's school bus
On Friday morning, the Orange County Public Schools sent a text, robocall and a tweet, informing parents that due to the high number of drivers being absent, school buses might be late on Friday for both the morning and afternoon commute.
OCPS families, due to a high number of driver absences today, school buses may be running late both this morning and this afternoon. Please have patience and if you can drive your student to school or carpool, that may be helpful.
— ocpsnews (@OCPSnews) April 15, 2022
In Osceola County, the school district there is facing the same problem as the already slim fleet may be stretched even thinner as people observe Good Friday.
Parents have been warned to expect possible changes to commutes to school on Friday.
The School District of Osceola County has a big need of 40 drivers and 140 school bus attendants, so staff is already slim.
The Osceola County school district says 4,000 students have been added to bus routes since this school year started.
More students are relying on buses to get to school.
As some drivers may have warned, they plan to observe Good Friday by taking the day off — it could complicate things further.
And bus routes could change. There are already 31 unassigned routes, which was a problem, before Friday.
“We ran into a situation Tuesday where, I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, where three of our routes originally didn’t have anyone to cover them," said Zach Downes of the Osceola County School District Transportation Department. "But I cannot express enough how hard this team works every day to put kids on the bus to get them to school because we solved that situation in an hour, and that just speaks volumes to our staff here. We work endlessly.”
School district officials said they are hoping a job fair next week will help deal with the bus driver shortage. The district is raising the pay for drivers and attendants to $15 an hour. It is a way to try to entice people to apply for the next school year.
Osceola County School District Transportation staff are recommending that parents download apps that track school buses. One of those, called Where’s The Bus, shows the status of your child’s ride to school.
Spectrum News 13 reached out to other school districts in Central Florida. Jason Wheeler, the community information specialist at Flagler County Schools, said that it was a teacher workday, which meant that students were not in school.
Director of Public Relations Kevin Christian of Marion County Public Schools replied that the schools in the school district are closed for Good Friday.