Start of school is messy with Anchorage and Mat-Su short of bus drivers

The start of the school year will be a mess.

Facing severe shortages of school bus drivers the Anchorage and Matanuska Susitna school districts have sharply scaled back bus service just as schools were to open this week.

This will hit parents and students hard in the Eagle River-Chugiak areas, where school bus routes tend to be longer and commuting to work in Anchorage takes more time.

Parents are juggling work commitments to drive children to schools and in many families children are at more than one school depending on their age, compounding the problems.

The Anchorage School District said Aug. 11 it only has enough drivers to serve 7,000 of 20,000 students it normally moves daily. In a sharply reduced schedule the district has adopted a schedule of three weeks of bus service followed by six weeks of no service.

Buses serving special needs students will operate as normal, however, as school officials shift resources.

In the Chugiak and Eagle River areas the six-week curtailment of service happens right at the start, so that means no bus service until Oct. 3, and then only for 17 days until the next six-week suspension starts.

Anchorage was 71 drivers short of its needed with 14 in training as of Aug. 11, the school district said. However, there are more applications coming in for driving jobs, the city’s new superintendent, Jharrett Bryantt, said in an email to parents.

Mat-Su said it is also short about 20 drivers but that its new bus contractor, Durham, is sending additional drivers from the company’s Lower 48 operations.

There are only 45 drivers available to cover 116 bus routes across Anchorage. The district is concentrating resources to help special needs student, so that the 113 special needs bus routes have 113 drivers available.

“Routing bus routes were determined using a randomized process. Schools may not be confined to a single cohort,” Anchorage school spokesperson Lisa Miller said Tuesday.

“Route reinstatement priorities remain the same. The top priorities are safety, student needs, and efficiency. We’ve already been able to make some of those efficiency improvements. Those families are receiving direct communication from our transportation team,” Miller said in an email.

Readers can view ASD’a message here: https://www.asdk12.org/busroutes