The Queen Creek Unified School District has been affected by the national bus driver shortage, but officials say the district is achieving a high on-time performance rate with the help of third-party transportation.
Peggy Overton, director of transportation for the Queen Creek Unified School District, said the bus driver shortage has been in place nationwide for a few years now and the district is working to focus on employee retention as well as continuing to hire and train employees to manage the shortage.
"I came to Queen Creek in June of 2019 and they were already experiencing a driver shortage," Overton said. "That being said, we've just tried to work diligently to focus on employee retention and to continue hiring and training."
She explained that there is a constant rollover with employees, and this increased with the COVID-19 pandemic. There were close to 30 resignations during the pandemic.
At the start of the 2020-21 school year, the district explored third-party transportation services to ensure it could handle all the routes.
The third-party transportation they utilize is two private contracted school bus companies, Beeline Transportation and American Explorer Motor Coach.
Overton added that there was an improvement in timeliness the first quarter of this year, compared with the first quarter of previous school years.
During the first quarter of the 2019-20 school year, on-time performance was at 83.33 percent. During the 2020-21 school year, on-time performance was at 92 percent for the first quarter. The first quarter of this year was at 95.85 percent.
Overton said the on-time performance continued to increase though every quarter and last year the overall average performance was at 97.41 percent.
The district tracks on-time performance and delays daily through GPS systems.
Moving forward, Overton thinks the district will continue improving on-time performance.
“I think moving forward we’ll take a constant uptake in the trend as far as the percentages,” Overton said. “Right now, our biggest challenge in Queen Creek is keeping up with the growth of the community. Sometimes the growth drives us to add additional routes, thus far we have been able to balance that very well.”
The district increased by 13 routes for this year as opposed to last year.
Overton added that they check riderships every week and look into consolidating routes when possible to better utilize their equipment.
“That helps us provide the best service we can for the community,” Overton said.
