In the past three years, Wake County has cut one in five bus routes, bumped children off the bus who live within a mile of their school, required others to walk farther to the bus stop, and now is considering starting some schools earlier in the morning.
Why? A shortage of school bus drivers.
Wake County, one of North Carolina’s biggest, is contending with a school system that has grown 25% to 160,000 pupils in the past decade and a supply of drivers that has fallen 18% to 740 in the same period. Supervisors regularly have to fill in.