February 10, 2025 by Emma Gowen (‘25)
With all the bus cancellations that have been impacting the Saratoga Springs City School Districts’ students this year, the need for a solution to the recent lack of busing is a hot topic among students and parents alike. The SSCSD administration has been diligently working behind the scenes to try and prevent the cancellations of buses but are struggling with the absence of available bus drivers, especially during this time of year.
“It’s been a challenge for school districts for a few years now. I think it’s been highlighted more since COVID, when we came back from the pandemic, but we’ve been challenged with recruiting bus drivers for the last several years. It’s not something that’s really unique to Saratoga Springs, most school districts in the area, in the state have been challenged with recruitment efforts,” said Dr. Patton, Saratoga’s superintendent. “If you go back to pre-pandemic, in the 2018 or 2019 school year, we had about 85 or so drivers on staff. Fast forward to six or seven years later, we’re trying to meet the same demand, with numbers of kids, with our to and from school bus runs, as well as late bus runs, activity runs, field trips that happen during the day, maybe sports trips after school, but now with 67 drivers that we have available to us.”
In the colder months, retired drivers who act as substitutes are often heading down south to warmer destinations and cannot provide their services to the school. When they are back to driving in April, however, the substitute pool is much larger but until then the administration must still provide busing with fewer drivers, explained Dr. Patton. “It becomes all hands on deck with everybody who is certified to drive a bus. Typically every day, we utilize everyone that we have available. There are some days we run out of people, and that’s where we get into the challenge of having to cancel runs. And nobody wants to do that, but it’s a supply and demand issue that we’re faced with,” Patton added.
Many students rely on the busing as their form of transportation and are now having to plan possible back up rides with the uncertainty of the buses. The administration understands this and is doing their best to continue to provide these services.
“Any day that we have to make the difficult decision of canceling a run, we want to minimize the impact on the number of families that are affected and then make sure no matter what the outcome is, that we still can provide an option to families to get the kids home,” said Dr. Patton. “It’s the to and from school that are obviously critically most important but there’s so many extra runs that we do every day and it’s great we can offer so many opportunities, but at the same time, that presents more challenges.”
Even through these challenges, there are solutions that are in the works to prevent future cancellations. The goal of the district is to continue to bring in more bus drivers; which seems to be the main cause of these issues.
According to Dr. Patton, the administration is “currently in negotiations with our Civil Service Employee Association (CSEA), so our transportation department, our food services, our teaching aids, teaching assistance, clerical staff, and all the support staff in the district. It’s over 500 employees in the district. We hope that as one of the outcomes of negotiations that we can continue to make salaries attractive for new people and as well as retaining existing employees.”
With a district as large as Saratoga, the struggle to find enough bus drivers to support all the kids relying on school-issued transportation is definitely understandable. A total of eight schools across the Saratoga Springs school district that all require busing; along with many other opportunities for students that also require busing like sports events, BOCES, and field trips is a lot for the limited bus drivers to manage. But, continued recruitment methods will hopefully lessen the load, and gratitude should always be expressed to our bus drivers who do so much for our students.
“They do an awesome job,” said Dr. Patton. “They love their job and they do a great job of helping support our kids and programs.”