School district continues efforts to keep buses on time with shortage
Although the percentages of on-time buses in the morning and afternoon have improved, the School District of Lee County is still battling with a shortage of bus drivers.
The goal is to increase the on-time percentage of buses by 3% from 88% to 91% in the morning and from 71% to 74% in the afternoon.
Quarter three for the 2023-24 school year is 92% in the morning and 72% in the afternoon, compared to the 2022-23 school year of 87% for the morning and 70% in the afternoon.
Chief Operations Officer Larry Stephens said they continue to deal with a shortage of bus drivers. There were 600 bus driver positions for the 2023-24 school year, with only 543 drivers starting off the school year. The district currently has 519 bus drivers, leaving 81 routes open daily.
“The transportation department has an additional 22 drivers unavailable to drive because of leave of absence,” he said. “In addition to those absences, we average over 40 drivers calling out daily. This results in having to provide coverage. Each route is responsible for two schools in the morning and two schools in the afternoon.”
The school district runs 548 buses every day — 2,452 daily routes.
During the Lee County School Board meeting on March 26, the presentation also highlighted decreasing preventable accidents. There is an accident review committee to determine which accidents preventable vs nonpreventable. Stephens said there are 22 accidents that are going to the committee.
The meeting also highlighted enrollment numbers over the past five years. An example given was for the 2019-20 school year with 84,328 students enrolled with 85,038 student seats. The compound annual growth rate is 0.84% students and 3.96% student seats.
He said there has been a consistent increase of student population corresponding with the growth of student seats.
“The increase has outpaced the student population districtwide,” Stephens said, adding that the new growth has been in the East Zone.
The presentation highlighted maintenance and the average days of service request is open. In 2023-24 the average number of days was 94.46, compared to 162.97 in 2022-23. The district is implementing strategies to increase preventative maintenance to reduce the overall service request that were entered.
“The goal is to keep maintenance cost below the state average. As we keep the cost down, we must also invest in facilities to maximize the useful life of facilities and systems,” he said.
Chief Financial Officer Dr. Ami Desamours went over business impact measures with a focus on breakfast and lunch participation in elementary, middle and high school.The benchmark for breakfast in elementary and middle school is 35% taking part and the benchmark for high school is 25%.
“We are meeting the benchmark as far as the elementary level. At the secondary level, we are not necessarily meeting the benchmark,” she said. “We are working to find out the reason why.”
Lunch, on the other hand, is at 75% benchmark for elementary school and 65% for high school
“Generally, at elementary and middle are meeting participation. High school level, no,” Desamours said. “We will continue to work on the reasons why and making sure we are reaching every student all the time.”
The last presentation touched upon IT Performance Management, specifically help desk, field support and in-shop repairs.
Chief Information Officer Dwayne Alton said their trends are continuing to improve year over year. Some of those are due to procedural improvements, better tools, and training programs.
The conversations stemmed around improvements of tech support and staff development.
“We have had a lot of turnovers — 60% of school tech people turnover in the last three years, new people in those positions,” he said. “The challenges we have had with recruiting a lot of our applicants are not coming in with a lot of experience, or credentials.”
To address this, the district is ramping up its training programs for the school level and staff in the district office.
“At the school level, all new tech people are assigned with a mentor, and they check on them regularly,” Alton said. “It’s a pretty big lift. Only 40% of people have credentials of any kind. Our goal is to bring that up to where entry level is four within two years.”
He said they currently have internship programs for high school students.
“The challenges are some local business partners are very good business partners and offer them more money. Of the people in the organization at the school level and district level, over 30 of them started in one of our internship programs,” Alton said.
The district also offers a paid internship program.
“In the past six months or so, we’ve seen the retention better. The market conditions are a challenge,” he said.
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