Fredericksburg Bus Drivers Address Pay and Working Conditions at School Board Meeting
Also, an update on the division's plans to filter student access to non-educational websites on their school-issued devices.
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
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Earlier this school year, the Fredericksburg School Board heard from numerous parents about the chaos caused by severe transportation delays and confusion surrounding a new app.
Yesterday, board members heard for the first time about how troubles in the transportation department are affecting bus drivers.
“I was told that speaking here tonight would be political suicide, but if standing up for what’s right costs me my job, so be it, because silence costs our students far more,” said one bus driver, reading aloud a statement prepared by Sandy Zimmerman, the division’s route manager and assistant office manager.
Zimmerman—who started in her position on August 11, shortly before the beginning of this school year, and had to start building bus routes immediately—could not attend the meeting herself due to a medical emergency, the bus driver said.
Bus drivers and bus attendants “carry the weight of [students’] lives, not just routes or schedules, yet they’re treated as if their work doesn’t matter,” Zimmerman wrote.
She said bus drivers aren’t paid enough to support themselves, let alone a family, and that bus attendants make even less with “no benefits, no guaranteed hours, and no security.”
The division’s bus mechanics are also paid “less than they deserve” and operate in one standard bay in a facility shared with Fredericksburg City government.
According to the school division’s budget, the average starting daily rate for bus drivers in Fredericksburg—step 10 on the salary scale— is $84.63. The daily rate is for four hours of work, according to the budget, which equates to $21.16 per hour. The annual starting salary is $15,234.
Drivers at step 30 on the pay scale make $111.89 per day—or $29.97 per hour—and $20,140 per year, according to the budget.
In Stafford, the starting hourly rate for a regular bus driver is $24.26, and a driver at step 30 will make $51.22 per hour. The number of contracted hours per day and days per year can vary depending on the employee, according to budget documents.
Zimmerman also said the city schools’ transportation department is understaffed and under-resourced.
“In our office, there are just three full-time employees managing an entire transportation department,” she continued. “One person handles routing for thousands of students under crushing expectations and constant scrutiny. There is no proper space for meetings, no transparent pay scales, and differing pay for the same work performed every day. And when someone dares to speak up, they are met with intimidation, guilt, or silence. How can we claim to put the students first when the people who get them to school safely every day are treated as expendable?”
Zimmerman’s voice wasn’t the only one from the transportation department heard at Monday’s meeting. Pamela Jacobs, a bus driver in the city for over a decade, said drivers recently have had their hours cut.
The Advance did not hear back from the division on Tuesday regarding Jacobs’ statement about hours being cut.
A shortage of bus drivers is one of the biggest contributing factors to this year’s transportation delays, leadership said earlier this year.
According to personnel packets approved by the School Board at meetings this fall, the division has hired 13 drivers and bus monitors since September, and two have resigned, including one who was hired the previous month.
On Monday, Jacobs also said that new technology purchased for the buses this year is causing problems for drivers.
“We have new tablets on the buses—but when it’s cold, they don’t work, and when it gets hot, they don’t work,” Jacobs said. “We’re trying to make these things work, but it’s not happening. The routes aren’t accurate. The student’s names on them aren’t accurate.”
Jacobs said bus drivers have been asking since she’s been on staff for a new fleet maintenance facility. The division’s current 10-year capital improvement plan shows $2.8 million for a new bus and maintenance facility in fiscal year 2028.
Construction of this facility has been pushed back in the past three budgets. According to the fiscal year 2024 CIP, it was to begin this fiscal year.
Update on Student Internet Access
Also at Monday’s meeting, Mike George, chief operations and information officer, updated the board on changes in how the division monitors and filters student website access.
At the November School Board meeting, Whitney Keit, the parent of a middle school student, read aloud from the browser history on her son’s school-issued laptop for one school day in October, which showed that he’d spent almost the entirety of almost every period watching non-educational YouTube shorts.
In an interview with the Advance, Keit said she’d started to notice her son bringing his school computer home and asking to access it all afternoon and evening.
“I asked him, ‘What can you do on it?’ and he said, ‘Oh, we can watch YouTube shorts,’” Keit said. “That was frustrating because I’m working hard to prevent him from being on technology and then he’s bringing home the school device where he has unlimited access.”
Keit said this gave her the idea to check her son’s browser history, where she realized that, “He’s on [YouTube] every minute of the day, except for lunch, where they’re not allowed to bring laptops.”
Keit began reaching out to School Board members with her technology concerns this year. Other parents have been asking for stronger filtering and monitoring of non-academic websites on student devices and during the school day since early 2022, both on their own and as part of the Superintendent’s Parent Advisory Committee.
In February of 2023, the division piloted a content filter called Deledao with students whose parents served on the Technology Committee, which was then in existence, but did not extend the pilot.
George said in correspondence from 2022 with parents on the technology committee—which was shared with the Advance—that it’s difficult to juggle requests for website restrictions with the requirements of educational software used in the schools. He also said staffing in the technology department was a “top priority” concern.
In his update on Monday, George said decisions about what websites to block are now made by the technology department in Central Office, rather than by individual principals as was the case previously. He said three main categories of websites are now blocked—video streaming platforms such as YouTube; gaming platforms, including coolmathgames.com; and “social and entertainment” platforms.
George said YouTube is in restricted mode for all students in grades K-8, but that it can’t be restricted at the high school level because it’s required by the educational software—such as the online learning platform Edgenuity—that is used in some programs.
School Board Chair Matt Rowe asked George whether there is any strategy for how to limit high schoolers’ access to YouTube, which is “the biggest attention suck for our students.”
George said that he doesn’t have a strategy for high school at this point, “as long as we have software that requires” access to YouTube videos.
George said the division will begin piloting Linewize, a classroom management tool for website filtering and monitoring, at the middle school in January. This tool was the top pick of a committee of staff members assembled over the summer, George said, and it gives teachers the ability to see—and shut down—what is happening on student devices in their classrooms.
George said an estimate of the cost of purchasing Linewize for the division as a whole will be part of his budget ask for next fiscal year.
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Excellent article.Well done!