Anchorage schools suspend bus service over shortage of bus drivers

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Grandpa isn’t the only one who had to walk a mile in the snow to school. Anchorage students may be able to tell their own grandchildren about the travails of getting to class during the time of Covid.

Due to a lack of bus drivers, the Anchorage School District Student Transportation Department has suspended bus service on some routes starting Monday.

“The action is necessary due to a shortage of bus drivers resulting from driver attrition and the impacts of COVID-19 on the Transportation staff. The administration aspires to resume normal service as soon as possible but is presently unable to determine the duration of this program,” the district wrote.

The school system developed a rotating system of temporary service suspensions based on specific bus routes to allow families to anticipate and plan for alternative means of getting children to school.

The district has endeavored to not just impact one route, and one set of students, but to spread the pain among all, with the aim of impacting the fewest families practicable.

The bus suspension is not affecting special education students or those attending Title 1 (low income) schools.

The temporary schedule is at this link.

Earlier this month, the Mat-Su Borough School District suspended some bus routes.

34 COMMENTS

    • The invisible public service job would do Dunbar and his communist colleagues a world of good driving a school bus for part-time job, helping out the school district.
      I know they can squeeze in their days three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon after 3pm to help the school district out. What else do they do, anyway? Hahaha

  1. Here’s the deal..

    Drivers are in demand. Drivers tend to be conservative.

    So forced mask wearing is a BIG part of the problem. I recently had to find a new driving job, and mask/VAX was a part of my choice.

    Fact! As a driver they have options wildly wide open. Finding a maskless/no VAX pressure job is EASY!!

    So why would you want to drive a bus with a face diaper on all day.

    Makes me curious how People Mover is doing for drivers.

    • I don’t think that’s it. I think Americans in general are tired of temp jobs with low pay and no benefits met with very low skill managers. On top of that, a cdl which could conceivably pay SO much more than driving a yellow school bus. Americans are fed up with this BS! Especially after this covid BS!

    • Did you get a refund from last year, when buildings were closed and parents were teaching kids at home? I surely did not…..

    • We have NOT received a fair return on the property taxes we pay in Anchorage for several years. BUT high-paid Muni employees who do not put in a full day’s work has become more apparent since COVID restrictions started up and Muni employees began to work at their homes. We can no longer telephone a Muni office and actually speak with somebody. Now we leave voicemail that is often not answered for several days, if ever. Two months ago I asked for an in-person meeting on a topic, but this was disallowed because the Muni employees don’t want to drive to their offices in City Hall because they prefer to work at home. Muni employee should work at their Muni-assigned offices or find new jobs!

      Anchorage’s city government is going downhill fast. Things got much worse under the acting mayor who should never have been permitted to sit in that office for the length of time she was there.

      I ask Mayor Bronson and his team to bring about the many changes our city needs to get Muni workers back to work in their offices. Muni services must become efficient and in line with what we tax payers pay for these services. I am tired of paying for Muni services that I am not receiving.

  2. On “some” routes. Ok. ASD has been a Royal mess for years. Everybody knows this
    … how about we get back to the governor who is so apparently (blank) that he can’t take action? Won’t fight for us. Why is that? Yet perhaps it’s that old consensus attitude that he got when he was working with the school district in The Valley. We wish he would step up. A lot of us spent time and money to get him elected to mix it up with the Juneau kabal. He’s not showing us much.

  3. But Trump told us the virus would just go away, all by itself, no vaccine needed, by Easter last year.

    How could bus drivers be sick more than a year after Trump said the virus would be gone?

    • Because of people who think like you, and go into a fear syndrome and believe the lies of many proponents of masking, emergency meds that have not been tested, and the many other fear-based tactics of folks driving this madness. Most who do not follow their own advice. For once, use the gray mass between your ears.

    • You should really see someone for that Trump Derangement Syndrome. Frankly remember Obama’s N1 H1 Swine flu, also designated a “pandemic”? He pretty much ignored it. No masks, lock downs, passports all that other nonsense. It is estimated that 700 million to 1.4 billion individuals world wide were infected and between 575,000 and 1.5 million fatalities occurred in 2009 alone, but we will never know as the economy was bad and Obama stopped all testing. The disease ran through the population, created natural immunity and we got over it.

  4. Then recruit the union bosses to fill in and drive the buses, if they care so much about students recieving uninterrupted indoctrination Hahaha

  5. I am a parent of one of these affected bus routes. The worst part was finding out on a Friday that Monday buses are canceled. The issue should have been communicated to parents much sooner.

  6. We will let the federal government send us massive amounts of money to fix our problem. Then we will brag about how us as Alaskans can cope with anything and are resilient.

  7. The Asian community seems to really embrace wearing the face diapers, maybe there’s a future for them as bus drivers?

  8. How about firing the lame superintendent of ASD. Then take all monies used to support her position and apply that toward raising the average bus drivers wage. Need more drivers pay more money.
    Further why are certain groups not affected by the storage of drivers? Everyone should feel the pain. After all the Special Education and Title 1 kids are already getting a larger slice of the ASD budget then your average kid. So now when basic services are reduced the average student is hit harder, again!
    Oh as far as not having her highness Superintendent anymore, eliminate her position, she will not be missed.

  9. It’s terrible pay for an, at most mediocre job. I’d much rather drive a day cab truck in town over dealing with unruly children and school district rules.

  10. Gee…the driver shortage wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with forced vaccines and face diapers, would it?

  11. Just wondering how it is that kids from Title 1 and Special Ed get rides while everyone else walks … is it because those programs are direct Federal Grants? Meaning that the moola dries up pronto if the Kids are not in School? Meanwhile, you the property taxpayer and citizen of the State are forced to keep the moolah rolling across the Education Kingdoms drawbridge. Education is a money racquet, be a good little serf and don’t question the authorities, just pay your rent and be grateful that they have some limitation on how much they can charge you, for now.

  12. Just wait until the hospital staffing shortages start surfacing due to forced vaccine mandates like they already are in certain areas of the country. This is only the tip of the iceberg. I support every worker that refuses to work due to forced vaccine mandates. Let the liberal shills deal with no goods and services.

  13. Will the ASD lose State funding for transportation? The State fully funds transportation and no local taxes pay for it. In 2019-20 school year the ASD got 23,965,783 for student transportation. WHY?

  14. Well more worker shortages are coming especially as vaccines are being pushed by employers, so get used to it. Just wait until you get the healthcare worker shortages. And this Governor doesn’t want to do a damn thing about it and instead is letting these medical fascists push vaccines on the work force. We will not comply with forced vaccine mandates! EVER! So we will quit our jobs and watch the whole economy crumble!

    • “The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world” – Professor Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman, World Economic Forum.
      THE GREAT RESET.
      Thats the plan all along. To bring in the “new”, you must first collapse the old. The economy, food shortages, vaccination, gun confiscation, the division they sew is all pre-planned and orchestrated to end our current system.

      • Exactly! This has been all preplanned and cleverly crafted for many decades. The funny part is some of us were already prepared and were ready long before Covid ever hit. We read the white papers and saw the writing on the wall long ago. The pandemic was no surprise; therefore many of us who are awake to this plandemic will survive outside this NWO system. Those who mocked and refuse to wake up and prepare will either bend the knee to the NWO or die trying to evade it.

  15. Fire the lame superintendent of ASD, she can’t even figure out how to get kids to school, let alone get them a quality education. Let the money follow the student not fund bloated salaries for inept education administrators.

    • Wouldn’t that be nice have more money allotted to homeschool. I only recieved 2100. We could use that allotment jumped up from 2100 to 7300, then we will have more money for private ballet (p.e. education) private piano (music instruction) and Community Kids Art workshops at Blaines Art (Art Instruction)

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