DeKalb District 428 families can soon get reimbursed for driving kids to school amid bus driver shortages

DeKALB – Cindy Blanchard told the DeKalb school board Thursday she “loses three hours of my work day every day,” driving her children to school amid a continued shortage of available school bus drivers.

The DeKalb School District 428 board approved a plan this week to reimburse families some money based on the mileage they have to drive to take their children to school. Additional bus routes were canceled in October because of a lack of drivers, district officials said.

Blanchard, a widowed mother of four whose husband died from COVID-19, said she’s had to drive her children to school since August because of the school bus driver shortages. Shuttling her children among different school buildings five times per day is time-consuming, especially for a working parent.

She also said parents are notified last-minute about not having bus service, sometimes the night before a school day, making it difficult to plan.

“When I live in Cortland and my kids have to travel to DeKalb High School and it’s a 20 minute drive ... you need to offer some type of remote learning,” Blanchard said. “My kids already lost a year and a half, two years of a normal school day. They should not have to be transported every single day by me.”

The school board unanimously approved a system to reimburse families a rate of $0.56 per mile, which is the IRS standard mileage rate for 2021.

The miles will be based on each student that is assigned to a route and supplied to the district by First Student from their routing software system, according to district documents. For each day that a route was canceled, the parent or guardian can request the reimbursement. The reimbursement will be funded with federal Elementary and Secondary School Relief Funds.

In district documents, officials said that “due to bus driver staffing shortages” at the district’s bus driver provider, First Student, “some buses have been canceled.”

“First Student has been creative all year and managed to keep buses running (tiered routes, combining routes, late buses, etc.) since the beginning of the school year,” documents stated. “But starting the second week in October, we have had to cancel routes due to no drivers being available.”

Blanchard said there hasn’t been anyone directing traffic at the high school, and that it can sometimes take two hours to get out of the high school parking lot after school.

“I’m waiting for a tragedy to happen in that school,” she said. “Kids are walking across the street, cars are coming back and forth.”

Cindy Carpenter, the school district’s director of business and finance, said that the reimbursement will be “based off of mileage and the number of kids.”

The school district will be developing a reimbursement system that parents and guardians can access. Details regarding the program’s start date and how the reimbursement funds will be distributed are in the works.

School Board Member Samantha McDavid agreed with the reimbursement system, saying as a school board, “it’s what we can do” to help alleviate the difficulty of bus transportation for families in the district.