A worsening shortage of school bus drivers is leading to the partial or complete suspension of bus services at 14 public schools on Oahu and Kauai for the new school year, adding to transportation woes already long plaguing public schools on Hawaii island and Maui.
The suspensions announced Tuesday by the state Department of Education will affect about 1,130 students at 10 Oahu high schools and 250 students in four schools on Kauai for the school year starting Aug. 7.
Students at the affected high schools will be provided with subsidized county bus passes to use for TheBus and Skyline on Oahu and the Kauai Bus, as part of the ongoing EXPRESS subsidized public-transportation program for students in four counties. DOE information on the EXPRESS program is available at 808ne.ws/3O7t2Mo.
This year all DOE student IDs for grades 9-12 on Oahu will be designed with the capacity to double as a HOLO card for public transit fares. However, they will not be activated or usable for transportation until a parent registers their child online with information from the school ID, a DOE spokesperson said.
The bus driver shortage is a national problem, said Randy Tanaka, assistant superintendent in the DOE Office of Facilities and Operations. “It’s been this way for the last two years when we started coming back to school. And during the period of COVID when everyone was out for two years, clearly the drivers, to sustain their families, needed to find other jobs,” he said at a news conference. “We lost quite a bit of drivers. … There are just not enough qualified drivers in the pool.”
The eight companies contracted to provide school bus transportation for Hawaii public schools statewide typically need about 650 drivers in all but currently are short by nearly 230 drivers, he said. Just over the past school year, 76 bus drivers left their positions.
On Maui and Hawaii island, some school bus routes already have long been modified due to the bus driver shortage, with some routes changed or combined. School bus routes on Molokai and Lanai have not been affected, DOE officials said.
The problem has been exacerbated by comparatively low pay and the requirement that school bus drivers get a higher level of commercial driver’s license, Tanaka said.
Average annual pay for an elementary or secondary school bus driver in the U.S. is about $40,460, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. At Roberts Hawaii, one of the state’s busing contractors, a job description on its website for a school bus driver says pay starts at $26 per hour, or $54,000 per year, plus a $1,000 signing bonus.
“We’ve tried numerous strategies to get more drivers aboard,” Tanaka said, including improved pay and benefits, signing bonuses and job fairs.
The DOE has also reached out to mainland bus operators, tour bus operators, the National Guard and firefighters, among others. “All of these groups were unable to assist due to their own staffing shortages and liability issues,” DOE Deputy Superintendent Curt Otaguro said in a statement.
To choose which Oahu campuses would have school bus service suspended, DOE and city officials worked together to discern which have more robust public transportation available as an alternative, Tanaka said. Special-education students are still being provided bus service, a priority required by federal law, he said. Elementary school students were prioritized, he said.
Letters from the affected schools are being sent to parents this week, with detailed route information and guidance. “We’re trying to do our best to keep the families notified because we know it’s highly disruptive,” Tanaka said.
Kapolei resident Mila Ramones, whose daughter attends Kapolei High, said a couple of friends who will be affected by the bus suspensions had already contacted her family Tuesday to ask whether their children can catch a ride when school starts, since Ramones already drives her own kids.
“We’ll be carpooling,” she said.
It means hitting the road earlier, she added, but “what else can we do? Gotta kokua.”
The subsidized public transportation program for high school students in four counties, known as EXPRESS for Expanding Ridership to Educate Students in Schools, was launched as a pilot project last school year in response to the bus driver shortage and will be repeated again this school year.
Under EXPRESS, free county bus passes are offered for all students in grades 9-12 on Oahu, Maui, Kauai and Hawaii island, subsidized by the DOE in partnership with the counties. Tanaka estimates the DOE cost at about $300,000, from funds that were already allotted for student bus transportation.
In 2022, 8,000 students on Oahu participated in the EXPRESS program and made more than 1 million trips, said Roger Morton, director of the city Department of Transportation Services.
For a typical family of four with two school-age children, he said, the subsidized HOLO cards are an $800 value per year. Among the benefits of having more young people use public transportation, Morton said, is that it will “promote environmental sustainability, lifelong users of alternative travel modes and … reduction of traffic congestion.”
SCHOOLS WITH CANCELED BUS ROUTES
Fourteen public schools on Oahu and Kauai will see school bus service partly or completely suspended when the new school year begins Aug. 7. All students in grades 9-12 in the state’s four major counties are being offered free, subsidized county bus passes; go to 808ne.ws/3O7t2Mo for more information on the EXPRESS program.
Oahu
>> Aiea High
>> Campbell High (three of four bus routes suspended)
>> Castle High
>> Kailua High
>> Kapolei High
>> Mililani High
>> Nanakuli High & Intermediate (all high school bus routes are suspended; intermediate school routes will continue)
>> Pearl City High
>> Waianae High
>> Waipahu High
Kauai
>> Kapaa High
>> Kapaa Middle
>> Kapaa Elementary
>> Hanalei Elementary
Source: State Department of Education
