Regional School Unit 5 has taken an initiative to address a persistent shortage of school bus drivers, offering training for people to obtain their commercial driver’s licenses.

Dennis Ouellette, RSU 5 director of transportation and facilities, said the district faces the same problem as other employers.

“People aren’t getting their commercial licenses like they used to,” Ouellette said. “There’s such a shortage of drivers that we have trouble getting them. We’re doing what we have to do to try to find some drivers and teach people how to drive a bus.”

Ouellette said that the training procedure begins when interested people enter the RSU 5 Central Office on West Street in Freeport and pick up a commercial driver’s license manual. Prospects study eight modules they need to learn in order to obtain a permit, which requires answers to 150 questions.

“Then we hook them up with Karen Sylvain, a bus driver from Pownal who is our certified trainer, for road tests,” Ouellette said. “We’ve already started. We have two people who have their permits and one who’s studying the book. Now we’re training the two with permits on their skills.”

RSU 5, which has six schools, employs 13 full-time bus drivers who do morning and afternoon runs, and work in between as custodians, Ouellette said. There are six part-timers.

Bus drivers earn $18.02 an hour to start, and custodians get $16.74 to start. Ouellette said that a bus driver/custodian works about five hours driving and three hours in the schools, so their take-home pay is slightly on the higher side of the equation.

Ouellette said that the eight modules of study on the Maine Commercial Drivers License Manual include four disciplines each to earn a class B driver’s license and to drive a bus. Class B study units cover such topics as driving safely, transporting cargo and knowledge of air brakes. The bus driver requirements include transportation/passenger safety, pre-trip preparation, a skills test and on-road training.

“Candidates are required to pass a physical exam and a written test to receive a driver’s learner’s permit,” Ouellette said. “Once they feel they are ready, they send into the state for a date to take the permit test. Once the permit is acquired we put them in contact with one of our senior drivers to get instruction with real road testing practices and cone skill driving time. It can take a few months to get comfortable enough to send for the road test given by the (Department of Transportation). Once the road test is passed they are legal class B drivers with school bus driver endorsements and can pursue a career in school transportation.” The need now is for part-time bus drivers to take students to athletic events and field trips, Ouellette said. Those jobs could work into full-time positions, he said.

For now, RSU 5 is making do.

“We have people who fill in,” Ouellette said. “If I need to drive, I’ll drive, and if my assistant, Joe Pace, needs to drive, he’ll drive. We manage.”

Jamie Logan, communications director for the Maine Department of Education, said that the bus driver shortage is a national issue. Logan referred to schoolbusfleet.com, a blog that said low unemployment rates accompany the problem.

“The past couple of years have yielded widespread driver shortages for school districts and contractors alike,” blogger Thomas McMahon wrote. “School bus driver shortage is a problem that wanes and waxes, and 2014 and 2015 were decidedly on the waxing side. While a variety of factors at the local level — driver pay, department morale, job market competition, etc. — affect whether a school bus operation is able to recruit and retain enough drivers, a reliable indicator of driver shortage on the national level is the unemployment rate.

“Over the years, our research has consistently found that the prevalence of school bus driver shortage is high when the unemployment rate is low, and vice versa. It seems that when more jobs are available, fewer people are willing to get behind the wheel of a yellow bus, or they are drawn to better-paying gigs.”

The trend is affecting neighboring school districts, too.

Norm Justice, transportation director at Gorham School Department, said recently that his department “almost hit a critical point last year.”

Joan Harmon, transportation coordinator for the Westbrook School Department, is revamping routes. Some Westbrook routes have been shortened.

“I could use four drivers,” Harmon said.

Regional School Unit 5 keeps its buses at the Freeport Public Works garage on Hunter Road. RSU 5 needs more people to drive them.