

She says there should be an aide on the bus watching students to make sure they’re behaving and are safe.
AVERAGE BUS DRIVER SALARY DRIVERS
say school bus drivers should just be in charge of driving students safely. Parents like Robin Godby of Pembroke Pines, Fla. Their role in keeping students safe was highlighted recently when 13-year-old Lourdes Guzman-DeJesus was shot and killed on a Miami-Dade County charter school bus in November.Ī 15-year-old boy, also riding the school bus, brought a loaded gun with him and it accidentally went off.

AVERAGE BUS DRIVER SALARY HOW TO
School bus drivers follow a training curriculum from the Florida Department of Education which covers passenger management, traffic awareness, how to handle special needs students, and how to safely load and unload students. It can be a minimum wage job that involves a lot of responsibilities. and can end at 10:30 p.m, with about four unpaid hours in between while students are in class. Milton takes students on field trips and waits to transport students who have after school sports and activities. The drivers say it's not enough time to get a second job during the down time. When students are in class, school bus drivers wait for about four unpaid hours at a school bus driver's lounge. “And if they want me to work on the weekend, I will.” “I try to do overtime at least every day, 5 days a week,” Milton said. But she says many of the drivers work overtime and weekends to earn extra money - like Sharayne Milton. She says bus drivers are paid for the 191 days when students are in school. Ronda Martin is with the Office of Labor Relations for Miami-Dade public schools. In Orange County, the average salary is $15,504. It’s about the same in Florida’s largest school districts, Miami-Dade, Broward, and Hillsborough. In Florida, the average salary for a full-time school bus driver is $17,380 a year. In Miami-Dade, Florida’s largest school district, none of the school buses have security cameras. He says a dispatcher can call a School Resource Officer and a child’s parents, in addition to an ambulance and anyone else that may be needed.īut some parents argue school bus drivers should call 911 before they call anyone else.Īt a time when the state is looking to ramp-up security in schools, some point out school buses have not been a part of the conversation. “But beyond that, the dispatcher can reach a wide variety of people and try to get the closest people there to be able to assist.” “We have access as quickly as they do to be able to call, you don’t really save time,” Klein said. The Hillsborough County school district could not comment because they’re in the middle of a lawsuit over the circumstances surrounding Herrera’s death. But in Miami-Dade, Klein says calling a dispatcher is just as good as calling the police. In Hillsborough County, a school bus driver called the district when 7-year-old Isabella Herrera was having trouble breathing on the school bus. The little girl had a neuromuscular disorder, and she later died


And that has sparked some controversy in Florida. “There is a process for them to fill out a report and then the schools deal with it like any other misbehavior in the schools.”Ĭalling a dispatcher is the protocol for any emergency on a school bus. He’s in charge of school transportation in Miami-Dade County. “Our drivers do not take actions against individual students,” said Jerry Klein. If nobody pulls the kids apart, bus drivers are instructed to call the district dispatcher - and not the police. “Usually if there are some other guys on the bus and the guys have respect for the bus drivers, the other young men on the bus will pull them apart,” Tillman said. and end at 10:30 p.m.ĭriver Gwendolyn Tillman doesn’t usually get between students fighting on the school bus. Miami-Dade school bus driver Sharayne Milton says she tries to work overtime weekends every day to earn more money than the $12.16 she makes an hour.
