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Northwest ISD families,
I’m grateful for the tremendous start to the 2023-2024 school year we’ve experienced so far. Our students are experiencing meaningful learning with our teachers and support staff, and there have already been hundreds of events where families have shown strong support for our schools.
While we’re having a great school year, we are still experiencing challenges with busing. These challenges have improved slightly, but we still face an uphill battle because NISD is growing rapidly in the midst of a nationwide bus driver shortage.
As I wrote to you in August, our growth plays a big role in the logistical planning of our transportation services. We’ve added about 700 students since the start of the school year, and though we are actively hiring new bus drivers, our transportation department is not yet fully staffed. We have 147 full-time and two part-time drivers employed, and we would like to reach 175 drivers to meet our rapidly growing district’s needs.
We continue to look for ways to recruit new drivers, and we’ve undertaken the following initiatives since the start of school:
- Implemented district-provided bus driver training for those interested in becoming bus drivers and earning their commercial driver’s license.
- Began allowing part-time bus drivers for those who would prefer to drive only in the morning, afternoon or on extracurricular trips. Previously, bus drivers were required to run both morning and afternoon routes.
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Began analyzing the district budget for potential bus driver pay updates following last year’s pay increase.
We plan to continue to take action to recruit and entice new drivers to our district in the coming weeks. Unfortunately, the national bus driver shortage has also affected school districts across the region and state. Locally, the availability of bus drivers has been affected by competition from Amazon and UPS for drivers. These corporations are not constrained by the same funding limitations that Texas school districts experience.
These busing challenges have been most apparent in afternoon routes for our secondary schools, which have seen more delays than other types of routes. When elementary routes are delayed from a staffing shortage or traffic congestion, that in turn affects the secondary routes that use the same buses and drivers. We are in the process of analyzing some routes to see if any efficiencies can be obtained, such as changing some routes completely or potentially combining some middle school and high school routes.
Please know that every available Northwest ISD transportation staff member who is qualified to drive a bus is doing just that. Department leadership on our transportation team is out driving routes in both the morning and afternoon, as are staff members who traditionally focus on office duties such as routing. Our transportation team is truly putting its whole heart into their work to meet the needs of our families, and I’m grateful for their unprecedented efforts.
I hope this information is helpful, and we are thankful for your continued support and patience as we work through these challenges. We would also be appreciative for your help in recruiting drivers for our NISD fleet. We are actively recruiting and will provide CDL training and support for both full-time and part-time drivers.
Sincerely,
Mark Foust, Ed.D.
Superintendent, Northwest ISD
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