Support Bus Drivers
As Superintendent, I am used to making difficult decisions. Throughout this pandemic, with children’s learning, adult’s livelihoods and the health of people of all ages on the line, we’ve faced tough decisions daily and few good options.
With 9,600 employees, the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) is among the largest employers in San Francisco. The SFUSD, like so many other school districts, has been hard hit by the pandemic. The needs of our students and their families have grown exponentially while the resources and options to serve them are increasingly limited by dwindling reserves, rising costs and a dynamic public health crisis. Still, we have prioritized keeping SFUSD staff employed and helped our contracted bus company First Student do the same for their employees for nearly five months.
I understand that many businesses are struggling to survive and those that transport students to and from school are no exception. Our district supports federal relief to support bus drivers during this service interruption, including the Coronavirus Economic Relief for Transportation Services Act, which would provide $10 billion in emergency grants to school bus and motorcoach companies.
During the first five months of the pandemic, SFUSD paid over $6 million to First Student in order to support the wages and benefits of bus drivers and other First Student employees affiliated with the school district’s contract, even though First Student provided no services given that schools were closed, and, as a multinational corporation, the company has pockets that are much deeper than ours. Since the 2015–16 school year when our current contract with First Student began, SFUSD’s Transportation Department has paid First Student over $149 million or approximately $30 million per year to bus an average of 3,600 students annually.
First Student (FS) is part of First Group plc, a publicly traded British multinational transportation corporation founded 25 years ago, based in Aberdeen, Scotland. The company operates multiple transport services including bus, coach, rail, and tram in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and yellow school buses in the United States and Canada. Their revenues for 2019 are noted at $7.13 billion. Publicly available information indicates that FS has been First Group’s most profitable division, with a profit margin of 9%.
It is clear that privately employed school bus drivers have been hard hit by the changing needs of districts during this pandemic. It is not clear what provisions and resources are available to multinational, private corporations like FS to support their employees during this global pandemic. It is also not clear whether FS, or its parent company First Group, has exhausted its reserves or or tapped into other funding streams to support its employees. We do know they have already laid off their drivers who are now turning to school districts such as ours, not their employer, to pay their salaries and benefits. Presumably these drivers and employees have applied or will apply for the unemployment benefits to which they are entitled. Any amounts our district would pay the drivers for health benefits or salary would simply lower the amount of unemployment assistance they receive, resulting in no net benefit to FS employees, but significantly impacting SFUSD’s already tight budget.
When the time comes to return to in-person instruction, we want to be ready to transport our students and we anticipate that it will likely cost more than the $8,686 per student it already costs us in order to transport students safely following the public health guidelines for physical distancing.
We hope that FS will do right by their employees. We support the Coronavirus Economic Relief for Transportation Services Act as one way to help FS and other companies that provide student transportation services bridge the gap in funding while waiting for their services to be needed again.
