Who’s driving the bus?

PHOTO: John Picken, Flickr CC-BY

It’s back to school season!

For me, this has always been a special time of year. I loved school as a kid. College, too. I covered education as a reporter and editor. Then I became a college instructor. As a parent, school meant something different: freedom, maybe, but also the growth and development of those pudgy little babies we brought home from the hospital. We just brought our oldest to college last week. 

Schools build a society that works, but it’s easy to ignore the core mechanics of how school happens. In public schools, all the children of a place — a neighborhood, town or region — are promised transportation to and from school every day. It’s amazing. But this system relies on people: in this case, bus drivers.

My newest column for the Minnesota Star Tribune is “Without more drivers, wheels on rural Minnesota school buses can’t go ’round.” The piece explores the bus driver shortage that plagues districts across the state, especially in rural areas. I talked to bus companies in every corner of Minnesota, including a couple here on the Iron Range. The conversations have me considering bus driving as gap employment when I’m approaching retirement age (an event in the distant future). But they also have me wondering just how so many routes across the state are going to be filled over the next few years.

You can read the column at StarTribune.com. If you’ve used up your free views, try a very affordable $1 trial subscription, or pick up a paper copy off the news racks on Wednesday, Sept. 4. The Minnesota Star Tribune has the best puzzle page in the state, and Wednesday is the not-too-hard, not-too-easy day. 

 

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