Cooper announces funding for temporary school bus trainers
North Carolina will hire seven new temporary trainers for school bus drivers — an effort to speed driver candidates into service amid a nationwide driver shortage.
Gov. Roy Cooper announced today $1 million in federal funds that will pay for the trainers and provide bonuses to keep others.
The state will place one new trainer in each of the seven transportation regions.
Coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, many school systems said they couldn’t get drivers trained fast enough.
As of July, the DMV had seventy-two trainer positions and seven of them were vacant.
While the number of people with commercial driver’s licenses has gone up in North Carolina, the number of them with school bus certifications has plummeted, from 41,287 in 2018 to 30,345 in 2022.
The lack of bus drivers is leading to thousands of students being late for school.
As schools attempt to ramp up hiring, some are running into a limit in the number of people who can be trained at once, according to Cooper’s news release Tuesday.
Cooper has proposed $1 million in permanent funding to add trainers and increase their salaries, but a new state budget has yet to be proposed or voted on by the General Assembly.
The Division of Motor Vehicles offers in-person and virtual classes. The in-person class has one instructor and can enroll up to 100 trainees. The virtual classes can have two or three instructors and enroll up to 200 trainees.
Cooper’s proposal also includes funding for retention bonuses of up to $3,000 for current bus driver trainers and funding for two buses dedicated for training. It’s unclear where those buses would be located.
