Summer's Over

Summer's over. I had my first official work-related experience of the new school year today. I had to do a bus driver physical assessment, which drivers have to take every other year. It's not hard. You'd have to be pretty badly off physically to not pass. The fact that I set the day's record for speed does not mean much, although I'll certainly brag about that to Husband when he gets home.

Sadly, my bus attendant, Kris, will not be coming back this year. We've kept in touch over the summer, so I know that she decided to stay home with her mother, who has Alzheimer's and dementia and is in late-stage renal failure. The doctors now give her a year or less to live. Kris herself also has multiple sclerosis, and being a caregiver for her mother has taken a massive toll on her own health. Kris is going to really miss "her kids," as she refers to our preschool students. She loves them.

Her decision to quit meant that the attendant route for my bus was put up for bid last week. When a route goes up for bid, other route drivers or attendants (in this case) can put in a request for that route. A new driver or attendant is chosen based on experience (attendants most often deal with special needs children), seniority, and the needs of the transportation department. It starts off a route shuffle, as well, as drivers or attendants switch to a new bus, which means the old route then has to go up for bid, and so on. If no route drivers or attendants bid on a route, the next substitute in line is offered the route. Substitute drivers and attendants cannot bid for routes.

The bidding closes today at 4pm, and when I asked the supervisor over attendants if anyone had bid on it, she said that seventeen people had bid for the route. I was astonished. Because sub attendants can't bid for routes, that's seventeen route attendants who have bid for a route that is only listed as getting 13.5 hours a week. Either they're desperate for a shorter route (why?) or they really want to work with preschool kids or they don't like their current routes. I'm not sure how many routes require an attendant, but it can't be more than thirty. My route will have more hours once school starts because we pick up a few Behavioral Unit elementary school kids at the end of the day and transport them home, but because that part of my route changes year to year, they can't include that in the official hours count. Also, preschool kids keep getting added to my route throughout the school year, so by the end of the year, my route gets at least twenty-five hours a week. Despite the lower hours, I do have an incredibly easy route for attendants. Preschoolers are energetic and bouncy, but they're strapped into their seats and are easily contained. I've never had huge problems with the elementary school-age behavioral kids, either, and we've only ever transported two or three of them at a time (that number can always change, of course). Some of the special needs kids on other buses can be very, very difficult to deal with on a daily basis. Most of them are great, but a few of them are large, strong, and hard to control, and that's wearing on the attendants and the drivers.

Drivers don't have any say in who gets the job as their bus attendant. I can only cross my fingers and hope it's someone I can get along with.

During my physical assessment, my boss (who still looks like he's barely into his mid-twenties) asked if I would be willing to do some driving the first week of school. Preschool doesn't start until a week after all the other kids start, and the bus garage has four routes currently without drivers. I said sure, of course. It's more money for me. Plus, I like my boss and the people in the office, and they're in a tight spot. But what the heck are they going to do for drivers, I wonder. Our small, mostly rural school district can't afford to match the pay that larger, more affluent school districts in The Big City can afford, and we bleed a lot of our drivers to those districts or to better-paying trucking jobs. With the rate of growth our little burg has seen in the last two years, we probably have at least three or four new routes in the valley--or will have by next year. You can tell thousands of people are moving in to our town based merely on the fact that we now have traffic jams on Main Street and commuters are always complaining about being backed up on the interstate waiting their turn to take the one exit into our valley--a trip often made even more frustrating by the frequent car accidents on roads not designed to handle this volume of commuters. Dozens of new subdivisions are popping up in former ranching pastures in town and all over the valley, new neighborhoods into which buses will soon be weaving. If you want to move here, do it now while housing prices are still somewhat reasonable and you can expect good appreciation on your property. I suspect that in a few years, the state will decide that it's financially expedient to blast a pass through the mountains into the valley where The Big City lies, cutting the commute time in half or a third, and then we'll become just another suburb of that city, enjoying even more traffic and an even higher cost of housing.  (However, it's more likely that they'll expand the commuter rail system out to our valley. That's got to be cheaper than blasting mountains apart to make roads, right?)

Ugh! I say it again: ugh!

But I digress.

Tomorrow is a day-long training. School starts next Monday. Summer's over.