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The Wake County school system will reduce bus service at 20 schools as it continues to recruit new drivers for next school year.
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According to documents for Tuesday’s school board work session, Wake is adding nine schools to its “non-transportation zone” program and expanding it at 11 other schools. This means that some families who live near those schools will no longer get bus service.
“NTZ’s improve transportation efficiency, maximize fleet utilization, and reduce ride times,” according to Wake’s presentation.
The changes come as Wake, along with school districts across the country, struggle to recruit enough bus drivers.
Under North Carolina law, school districts are not required to provide transportation to families who live within 1.5 miles of a school. Bus service is still sometimes provided to those families if schools feel it’s too dangerous for students to walk to school.
Wake will add these nine schools to its no transport zones, also called non-transportation zones:
Wake will also expand the existing no transport zones around these 11 schools:
The expansion of the no transport zones come as Wake says it has all 88,882 registered school bus riders assigned to a route with a driver for this fall.
Wake is still 32 full-time bus drivers short. The district will use other people, such as on-call drivers and team leaders, to fill in when needed to drive buses.
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The situation is significantly better than in 2023, when the school year opened with thousands of students getting to school late due to Wake not having enough drivers.
It’s difficult to recruit bus drivers because people with a commercial driver’s license can often make more money doing other jobs such as driving a truck or working for a municipal bus service.
In recent years, Wake has raised the minimum salary for school bus drivers to $20 an hour. Wake also paid $1.7 million in bonuses to bus drivers last school year to recruit and retain them.
Wake is also scheduled to give an update Tuesday on its exceptional children’s transportation contracts. Wake will serve 5,214 “exceptional children” who can’t ride regular yellow school buses for various reasons, such as some special education and homeless students.
Wake contracts with multiple private companies to transport these students. The district says it’s trying to repair relationships and rebuilt trust afters years of complaints from both families and the vendors.
Due to driver shortages, Wake reimbursed 974 families of exceptional children who provided their own transportation last school year. Wake paid those parents $1.8 million in stipends.
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