Students hunt rides to school
BY EVELYN RYAN
The Dominion Post
Deer season, sick drivers and no available substitutes left some Monongalia County students hunting for another way to get to school on Monday.
School officials had planned for a certain number of their employees to be off -- and a number of students to be out -- the opening day of buck season.
But this year, unexpected sick calls, and a class of substitute drivers that haven't fully qualified, left Transportation Director Irv Scheutzner scrambling to cover all of the bus routes.
It didn't work.
A large part of four bus routes were picked up by other drivers, but "we couldn't get all their runs" in the morning, Scheutzner admitted. "Most of the buses ran late. It was a matter of getting up all the hollers." Most of the alternative routes were ironed out by afternoon.
It wasn't the eight drivers who signed up well ahead of time to take Monday off to go deer hunting, he said. It was the three additional people who called in sick and left them shorthanded.
Adding salt to the wound, the county has a class of substitute bus drivers in the wings. They have their commercial driver's licenses, 30 hours of training, physicals -- they just don't have completed police background checks.
"We wouldn't think of putting somebody on a bus without a background check," Scheutzner said.
Mon County students only have two days of class this week. They're off Wednesday-Friday for Thanksgiving. Scheutzner doesn't believe there will be any problems today. "The first day is always the worst," he observed.
Monongalia County School Superintendent Michael Vetere couldn't help but agree.
Almost 1,500 students were absent Monday. He attributes most of the high school and middle school absences to "deer season."
He hadn't had a chance to total the number of staff members -- other than bus drivers -- also taking time off to go hunting.
Substitutes were available to cover teachers and other staff positions. The problem was with bus drivers.
"We can't cover those drivers because they have to have CDL licenses," he said. CDL, a special driver's license for bus operators and other commercial drivers, requires special training and tests.
"We have everyone out that we can possibly call. We worked to try to pick up as many children as we can. Unfortunately, we do not have enough substitutes to meet the needs of these runs. In some cases, parents have been helping out to get the kids back and forth to school."
Scheutzner said the drivers themselves volunteered to pick up children waiting for buses that weren't running.
"We anticipated deer season," he said. "We just didn't anticipate we would get one retirement, a couple other things, and a sub list that was not able to drive. It was just one thing after another. And it just hit us last Thursday and Friday. If we didn't have the call-offs for illness, we would have been OK."
