FORT MYERS, Fla. — It’s a stark reality with employee shortages many parents find themselves asking, will my kid make it to school on time?
That’s going to be a topic for discussion later this morning as Lee County Schools have an update on its current bus driver shortage.
Right now, the district is short of about 134 drivers. It’s a number that has been going up but significantly in May. They have plenty of buses at the compound, but it’s a matter of filling those buses with drivers.
As of right now, there are a total of 595 school bus drivers within the Lee County School District. They need a total of 729 drivers.
There are 69 daily open routes that they drive and the average number of drivers absent per day is between 35 and 40 drivers. Those numbers are from July and when you compare them to May, you can see they have gone up quite a bit. That does not include full-time substitute drivers.
It’s expected that a little more than 2,100 students will be late to school daily.
The good news is there are about two dozen new hires being trained right now.
We’ll be hearing more from the district on how they are working to bring in more drivers and make sure students arrive to school on time. They will be meeting this morning at 8:00.
