(Radio Iowa) – There’s a shortage of school bus drivers nationwide — and in Iowa. David Johnson, executive director of the Iowa Pupil Transportation Association, says it’s difficult to get younger people to consider the job because it requires working part-time — in the early morning and then after school. “That is the big struggle,” he says. “You really don’t have time to do a job in between.” Being a driver does require certain skills, according to Johnson.

“A teacher has 20 students in front of them. A bus driver has 50 students behind them and you can have a very calm route, you can have a very chaotic route. It kind of depends,” Johnson says. “Most of the people I talk to, once they get into it and do it, they love it.” Johnson, who used to manage school bus routes for the Van Meter School District, says drivers would often tell him they’d only drive for one more year — but then agree to drive for the next school year because they liked the work.

The average age of a school bus driver in the U-S is 57. Johnson says some older drivers did decide to retire once the pandemic put a stop to their daily routes — and that worsened the driver shortage.  “I think at the same time, right after COVID the feds put in more training you have to get a license and I think that hurt us as well,” Johnson says. “People are like: ‘I’m not going to go through all of this just to drive a bus for three hours a day.'” Johnson says there may be changes, though, in the federal rules that require entry level training for all those seeking a commercial drivers license, regardless of whether they intend to operate a semi or a school bus.

“There’s a lot of steps that school bus drivers have to go through,” he says. “They’re never going to drive a semi across the country, so they’re taking that stuff out and making it very school bus specific for people who want to get a school bus driver.” School bus drivers in Iowa must be a high school graduate, pass a criminal background check, meet medical requirements AND have a commercial drivers license. The chairman of the Iowa House Education Committee says he’s investigating whether it would be possible to create a transitional license for school bus drivers, a step that could help schools recruit new drivers as they complete C-D-L training.

National data indicates that when schools started this fall, there were about 12 percent fewer bus drivers than there were in 2019.