Solon bus drivers trained at Kirkwood in new partnership

SOLON — Three years after Michael Broghammer graduated from Solon High School, he was asked back as a school bus driver.

The district paid for Broghammer, 21, to get his Class B commercial driver’s license with a passenger endorsement so he could drive a school bus. That license also enables him to work as a truck driver for the Feed Mill in Solon a couple days a week. He spends the rest of his time working on his family farm.

Broghammer is one of five new bus drivers in the district who received training at Kirkwood Community College through a new partnership between them and Solon schools. The cost of training is paid through a $89,000 Future Ready Iowa grant for the Entry Level Driver Training Program the district received last year from the state.

While Kirkwood already had a program to train drivers to get their CDL Class B approval, which allows operation of different types of vehicles such as straight trucks, tow trucks and dump trucks, this is a new focus on training school bus drivers to help alleviate a shortage, said Kim Fensterman, senior manager of environmental, fire and transportation programs at Kirkwood. Since May, Kirkwood has trained 20 new school bus drivers through the program.

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Drivers pursuing their CDL Class B start on a simulator in a classroom. Kirkwood is working to purchase a school bus module for the simulator to give students who are interested in being a school bus driver experience specific to the field.

Curt Wheeler, a program developer at Kirkwood, decided to get his school bus license so he could better explain the process to inquiring students.

Wednesday, Wheeler practiced on the simulator. Climbing into the driver’s seat, he could feel the steering wheel shake as he “started” the engine. The simulation took him through thunderstorms and icy roads, construction zones and high-trafficked areas and stopping at stop signs, and presented truck maintenance issues like low oil pressure or blowing a tire.

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Later, Wheeler practiced driving a real school bus at the Kirkwood Continuing Education Training Center. The bus roared to life and began beeping to remind Wheeler to put on his seat belt. He practiced turning on the exterior lights and drove around an open lot.

Chad Lerch, a driving instructor at Kirkwood, smiled as he talked Wheeler through driving. Lerch enjoys “watching the transformation of students from ‘deer in headlights’ to jubilation after passing the first test,” he said.

Teachers in the driver’s seat

Lee Cusick, a social studies teacher at Solon Middle School, also received his school bus license this summer through Kirkwood Community College.

Cusick, a football and basketball coach, will be driving students for the first time Tuesday to a seventh-grade football game in Manchester — about 55 miles away from Solon. Cusick said he feels confident, especially driving on the interstate. Driving through a town he is unfamiliar with, however, “might be a crawl, but we’ll get to where we need to go.”

Mike Carson is a new route driver for Solon after retiring from IBEW Local 504 in March. Carson said the training took longer than he expected, but “once I got into this I wasn’t going to quit just because it’s a lot of work,” he said.

Carson said it’s “intimidating” to drive something as large as a school bus. There’s a huge learning curve knowing how much space it takes to come to a stop and how to make a turn with 12 feet of bus behind the rear tires.

“It’s good they gave us a lot of practice runs,” he said.

Slowly, Carson is learning the names of the students on his bus. “Some you learn their name because you need to — because you need to say their name a lot,” Carson said with a laugh. Overall, the students are “very polite,” and Carson said he’s building a good rapport with them.

Last year, Solon schools’ Superintendent Davis Eidhal said the district was “forecasting a cliff” as a shortage of school bus drivers continued. Eidahl himself even got his license to be a bus driver and filled in as needed.

Eidahl is optimistic about the number of new bus drivers the district hired over the summer. Route drivers now start at $27 an hour and drive for about three hours a day between a morning and afternoon shift.

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Solon schools is open to combining bus driver positions with other responsibilities, such as custodial or teacher associate. This year, there is a driver at the elementary school working as a teacher associate and driving a route after school, Eidahl said.

Clarence Ruby, another driving instructor at Kirkwood, said while the pay is good, split shifts are part of the challenge in attracting new drivers.

“I don’t know how to fix that problem,” he said.

Bus drivers needed

This week, the Iowa City Community School District postponed six junior high volleyball games because of a lack of bus drivers, according to a message to families Thursday. The district contracts Iowa Central School Bus for transportation services.

The Cedar Rapids Community School District has 26 bus driver positions open, putting them at “a slightly better hiring position than last year,” transportation manager Scott Wing said.

Linn-Mar schools reduced five bus routes this year, affecting about 300 families. There are four open routes in need of drivers, but several drivers are in the process of training, Linn-Mar transportation manager Brian Cruise said in an email.

In the College Community District, all routes have drivers, but more drivers are always needed, said Kris Hartgrave, the district’s director of transportation. In the last three years, eight routes were eliminated because of driver shortages.

Even so, the district continues to offer transportation to every student in the district, regardless of how close to the school they live. The state only requires schools to bus elementary and middle school students who live more than 2 miles from their school and to bus high school students who live more than 3 miles from their school.

Mount Vernon Community School District Superintendent Greg Batenhorst said its transportation department is fully staffed with drivers.

“It was a challenge filling some open positions in the last year, and we could face some more retirements in the not too distant future,” Batenhorst said.

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