The Economics of Everyday Things - 96. School Buses

Episode Date: June 16, 2025

Districts across the country are facing shortages of school bus drivers. Can technology help? Zachary Crockett takes a seat in the back. SOURCES:Keith Corso, co-founder and CEO of BusRight.Marc Medina, transportation supervisor for the Farmingdale School District in Long Island.Jada Melendez, school bus driver in Burlington County, New Jersey. RESOURCES:"How St. Louis parents are dealing with school bus driver shortages," by Gabrielle Hays (PBS, 2024)."The school bus driver shortage remains severe," by Sebastian Martinez Hickey and David Cooper (Economic Policy Institute, 2023)."‘End of the Line’: School Bus Industry in Crisis Because of the Coronavirus," by Pranshu Verma (New York Times, 2020). 

In the early morning hours, before kids have gotten out of bed for school, Jada Melendez is out in a parking lot preparing for the day ahead. You're looking at your tires, you're looking at the lights, the stop arm, your wipers, your horn, making sure all your nuts, and your bolts and stuff is all there. She ignites the engine on her 87 passenger Bluebird, checks her mirrors, and departs the depot at exactly 728. Take deep breaths, calm down.

You definitely gotta relax when you're driving that bus. And then, you know, just go for it. Like driving a big car. Melendez is a school bus driver in Burlington County, New Jersey. She's one of around 200,000 workers around the country who are tasked with safely and efficiently transporting K through 12 students to school. Driving a school bus is not a job for the week. You have to deal with screaming kids, helicopter parents, outdated navigation systems, and

split schedules that take up the whole day, often for an hourly rate that is hard to pay the bills with. In recent years, many school bus drivers have quit, and school districts are facing driver shortages that require creative problem solving. They're trying to figure out how am I going to get 2,000 kids to school when I'm down 19% of my drivers? They're looking at a map, trying to game plan. What routes can I merge?

What stops can I consolidate? For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crackett. Today, school buses. Around half of all students in kindergarten through 12th grade rely on buses to get to and from school. That's 26 million kids. And there are 480,000 school buses in operation around the country to accommodate them.

School buses make up the largest mass transit system in the US. In fact, if you add up all of the planes, trains, public transit buses, and other forms of mass transit, there are significantly more school buses. That's Keith Corso. He's the co-founder of a technology company called Bus Right. If you can't get kids to school, there is no school.

And so the school bus is more than a big tin can on the road. It's access to education. Every school district is responsible for handling its own transportation, whether it's thousands of buses in New York City or a single bus in rural Kansas. Around two-thirds of school districts choose to own and operate their own fleets. They buy their own buses, have their own storage yards, and hire their own drivers. Some districts charge parents a fee for bus access, but in most cases the cost comes out of public funds and it can be very expensive.

A traditional diesel bus will run you between $90,000 to $120,000. Electric vehicles can run you between $400,000 to $500,000 per vehicle. If you're a district with, with say 500 buses, that's at least 50 million dollars worth of vehicles and they need to be replaced pretty frequently. A lot of districts will on average replace five to fifteen percent of their fleet every single year because a lot of different districts have rules and policies such that they replace a certain percentage, no matter what, just to make sure

they're refreshing their fleet in full every X number of years. Districts need to rent or buy land where they can store all of those buses. They need to employ in-house mechanics to maintain them. And they need to find and pay hundreds of bus drivers to operate them on a daily basis. A third of school districts choose to outsource all of this to a private bus company instead.

There is for students, student transportation of America, presidential transportation, Desert Choice Transport, Beacon Mobility. The reality is that it's actually cheaper for a district to run their own fleet. But if you can't hire transportation leadership,routers, dispatchers, driver trainers—the list goes on, then that's where these districts are like, look, we're willing to pay a significant premium to outsource this service. Under a contract with a private school bus company, a district often pays a fee for each bus that covers everything they need. If you want to contract out to a bus company, each one of those buses will run you between

$65,000 to $110,000 a year, depending on where you are across the country. And that includes the entirety of the service, from the driver to the vehicle itself to the gas. Working out this math is one of many decisions that typically fall on the shoulders of a school bus district's transportation director. I'm on top of it like almost to the point where they're like Mark are you okay? What are you doing over there? That's Mark Medina. I'm the supervisor of transportation in the Farmingdale School District on Long Island. And I'm also the president of the New York Association for Pupil Transportation. Medina started his career in transportation in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

At the time, he was selling car insurance, but he was interested in a government job that had more stability and better benefits. He took a part-time gig as a school bus driver and eventually moved into the back office. Today, he's in charge of getting over 4,000 kids to and from school. I oversee the whole transportation department,

so we run about close to 100 buses. Like many transportation directors, Medina has to fight for every dollar of his budget. Transportation is at the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to you know the funds and stuff like that. Some districts are laying teachers off and laying workers off. They don't want to throw money into transportation. Figuring out how to pay for school buses is just one part of the job. Medina and his team have to plot out the home addresses for each bus rider and identify the most efficient stops to pick up groups of kids. The logistics can get pretty messy. You have a bus and it's going to cover a general area.

You're going to try to centralize these bus stops as best you can for every student with the intention that every student is going to be riding the bus. You might have five or six kids assigned to a stop and only one kid is using it and that kid's around the block. So you might make a minor adjustment, you know, to help out. Once Medina has the stops planned out, he maps out the best route for each bus, turn by turn. That's me sitting in front of a computer

and looking at every single route. There's streets where you don't want to make a left on. There's streets that you know where there's a traffic light that it's safe to make a left. This is our baby. We have to treat it as such. We're not shipping around boxes, right? This is very precious cargo.

In most districts, these routes are circulated to bus drivers on paper. Keith Corso says that's not an ideal system. I'd say half the time it's printed out through a routing software. The other half of the time it is written in hand or typed out on Word and printed out. And it says, drive 200 feet, turn left onto Bryant Ave. On Bryant Ave, in 200 feet, you'll be arriving at Zach Stop. And it has pages and pages of this information. Now the challenge is that

you have to read this in detail. It's six in the morning, it's pitch blackout, you don't know where you're going, the mailbox is tucked behind a bush and you can't read the number on it. This is all complicated even more by the fact that many kids need to be picked up or dropped off at different places on different days of the week. Half of these families have split custody arrangements. So a student might go to this house on this day, but they alternate every other day.

Whereas this other student alternates every other week. Whereas this other student does one month with this parent and one month with that parent. You have to tell John, the bus driver, we need to pick them up at their front door instead of down the street. They might be given a scribbled note from the transportation director and that's kind of how these things are done. So what does it take to pull this off?

And what's it like to drive around a giant yellow school bus every day? A lot of people don't appreciate us. They look at us like being an Uber driver and we're not. We're taking care of your kids. We're a babysitter. We're a nurse. We're a therapist. It's a lot that we do to keep the kids safe. That's coming up. Jada Melendez didn't plan on being a school bus driver. She started her career in the military, then worked in law enforcement while raising three children as a single mom. But in 2023, she decided she wanted to transition to something safer and more predictable.

She took some classes and got a commercial driver's license, a requirement for driving a school bus. Today, she works part-time for Shepherd Bus, a private company that owns and leases more than 600 vehicles to school districts in New Jersey. Most bus drivers is considered part-time, even though it feels like we have full-time hours. So I get like six and a half hours a day. Like many school bus drivers,

Melendez works on something called a splits shift. She works for three hours in the morning, running routes for high school and elementary schools, then another three hours in the afternoon when kids get out of class. Her schedule is planned out down to the minute. I drop them off at their school between 7.55 and 8. They are a short route. My high schoolers, my elementary is more of a longer route. And I normally start them like, first pickups like 8.08.

And I'm done with them about 8.45, 9. I get home about 9.30. So then you have to be back at the yard at 145. Some drivers are able to pick up shifts in between their morning and afternoon routes. But most days, Melendez says it's not quite enough time to work a second job. Split shift always feels like you have an extremely long day. I was just trying to like, I have a Wendy's across the street from my house. I got a Chick-fil-A. I just tried to go somewhere where I could just do something for a few hours,

but some jobs you just need at least five hours. It definitely isn't enough time to, I mean, unless you do like Dirty Dash or Uber Eats or something like that, then that's the only type of jobs that you could probably really do in between time. Even if Melendez did have enough time to work a second job between shifts, she says safely operating a school bus full of children is taxing enough. Yelling and screaming, getting up out of your seats while the bus is in motion, changing seats while the bus is in motion, eating while the bus is in motion.

You have to be the eyes and ears on the bus and looking forward and in traffic. So you're multitasking. A lot of my students, the little elementary, you can't even see them above their seats. It's look like you're driving a bus with nobody on it, you just hear them. But a bigger challenge is dealing with all of those kids' parents. I've had some parents that would come to your bus and want to tell you how to run your bus.

No ma'am, you don't tell me how to run my bus. This is my bus. I run my bus the way I see fit. They don't like it, then they can take their own kid to school. Keith Corso says that over the past few decades, parents have become an increasing nuisance to transportation departments. You now have more helicopter parents. There's this heightened pressure and concern over where children are.

New parents today can see exactly where their two or three-year-old is in child care, right? Because of all the cameras that are constantly watching those children. But school buses? Most of them aren't set up to be tracked in real time. And that drives parents nuts. These transportation departments are looking more like call centers. A call center just for parents. To give you a sense of just how concerned

and worried these parents are, when is the bus getting here? How dare you miss my child like that? We were just coming out the door when your driver left, you should fire that driver. Parents used to be okay with their kid getting picked up and dropped off at the same place and they'll figure it out. And that's no longer acceptable across the country.

Even when drivers bend over backwards to accommodate all of these demands, parents often don't have their kids ready to go on time. In Melendez's district, some kids are picked up at their house and others at designated stops. And in some cases, the state of New Jersey requires a grace period before driving off. This extra time can throw off a bus driver's schedule for the whole morning.

If you're at a house, you have to wait two to three minutes to see, you know, they're going to come or not. Corner stops, it's like a minute or two. That's what majority of time is going. It's waiting at the stops. Nationally, the average wage for school bus drivers is around $21 an hour, considerably lower than the average across all transportation jobs. For many drivers, the relatively low pay isn't worth the hassle of dealing with kids, parents, and a schedule that doesn't easily accommodate other jobs. And it's led to a serious bus driver shortage in districts across the country.

Drivers are quitting at record rates, and the driver shortage has been an issue for over a decade. School bus driver employment has been on the decline for the past 15 years, while the number of students has grown. Mark Medina says the problem only got worse during COVID when many older drivers quit and didn't come back. We've been dealing with an extreme, extreme school bus driver shortage. So much so that, you know, as a transportation supervisor, when you're putting together your routes,

you have to get creative. If I have 24 high school routes that need to be covered, but there's only 20 drivers, I have to figure out a way to get those four routes covered with those 20 drivers that I have, right? You look at the map, what schools are close to each other? Do their times work? Maybe we can combine those schools. It's like a game of Tetris where you have to fit these pieces to make the operation

work. Districts and private school bus companies have faced increasing labor market competition from companies like Amazon, which are constantly looking for workers with a commercial driver's license, or CDL. And school bus drivers are perfect candidates. In the area where Medina works, there are at least five Amazon warehouses nearby. And the e-commerce giant has plans to build more. They're popping up everywhere.

Are drivers going to those warehouses? Well, they are. And you know what? I don't blame them. There's so many demands that are put on a driver. They can drive for Amazon, make more money, and they're driving around packages and no one's screaming at them. Jada Melendez has seen a lot of fellow bus drivers leave for jobs like this. They want to do more money. They love the fact that they really don't have no one over their shoulder.

That it feels more like they're the boss of their own job. Districts are trying all kinds of things to attract and retain bus drivers, including $10,000 sign-on bonuses, paid training, and extended hours and benefits. In the meantime, they're taking dramatic action to fill the void. In St. Louis, district leaders temporarily enlisted private cab companies to get kids to school. In Philadelphia, the district has experimented

with paying parents $300 a month to opt out of bus service. And Corso says he's seen cases where some districts are even flying in school bus drivers from out of state. Think about how many other industries that you hear about, oh, they're dealing with a labor shortage. I guarantee you they're not flying people in from other states. Corso sees a potential solution in technology.

His company, Buswright, makes tools aimed at reducing some of the day-to-day annoyances that drivers and transportation directors face. We affix rugged military grade tablets to the dashboard of every bus in your fleet. Those tablets provide turn-by-turn driver navigation that's engineered for a school bus and the route that driver's taking at that moment.

Our web app sits on a computer in the transportation office. So the secretary, router, dispatcher, and transportation director can build routes in 60 seconds. They could track their vehicles in real time for the first time. They could communicate to parents in one click. And then we have a parent bus tracking app that thousands of parents will have right in their hand

so they could see exactly where their child is going to and from school, similar to what you might expect for Uber or Lyft. For the service, Bus Right charges a district anywhere from a thousand to $3, per bus per year depending on fleet size Pitching cash-strapped districts on yet another expense may seem like a hard sell But the company now has hundreds of customers in 33 states Mark Medina sees promise in the idea

But he says in the meantime you can find him sweating away in his small office But he says in the meantime, you can find him sweating away in his small office, where he and his colleagues are doing everything they can with the resources they have. There's a lot of hard-working transportation professionals, and they roll up their sleeves, they come to work early, they stay late, and it's not an easy thing. A lot of times it's overlooked. Sometimes I don't grasp the magnitude of what we're able to accomplish on a daily basis. I'm able to walk out of the office right now and be like, listen, every kid got home safe.

Every bus got to where it was supposed to be. That's a successful day, man. You know what I mean? For the economics of everyday things, I'm Zachary Crockett. For the economics of everyday things, I'm Zachary Crockett. This episode was produced by me and Sarah Lilly and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Daniel Moritz-Rapson. And shout out to our listeners Julie Wells and Eric Beider for suggesting this topic. If you have an idea for an episode, feel free to email us at everydaythings at Freakonomics.com. Our inbox is always open. Alright, till next week.

When parents call, I'll say to a parent very nicely, right? Listen, they hire it if you want to do it and I'll make sure you get put on your kid's bus. The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything. Stitcher.