Glistening in the morning sunlight, a yellow school bus makes a long left-hand turn across the parking lot of Westland High School, just outside of Columbus, Ohio. The vehicle rolls towards a row of orange traffic cones, comes to a deliberate stop and emits a sharp beep.
But the doors stay shut. It’s a Saturday. School isn’t in session, and the school bus driver is maneuvering an empty bus.
Welcome to the 2025 Ohio State School Bus Safety Road-E-O, where drivers from across the state compete to be crowned the “Grand Champion.” Driverly pride is on the line, along with the chance to rub victory in the faces of close friends and colleagues.
Organized by four different state departments that oversee public education, the competition is designed to promote and reinforce safe driving habits.
There are three main components to the Road-E-O. First, drivers have to take a written exam, which tests their knowledge of the state’s extensive school bus manual. Then, they must correctly identify five defects on a parked school bus, a task meant to mimic the standard pre-trip inspection drivers conduct before beginning their routes. Finally, the competitors get behind the wheel and steer a bus through an obstacle course, closely watched by a host of state-certified instructors who assign points to each driver based on their performance.
Brandon Anness is one of those judges. Clipboard in hand, standing stock still, his eyes are trained on the bus approaching him.
“We’re doing the serpentine event here, which is determining their ability to maneuver the school bus in tight spaces,” Anness told me as we watched the event. “They’ll go forward through the cones, and then they’ll do a reverse serpentine on the way back. They have to complete the circle to finish on the opposite side from which they started.”
The cones are placed perhaps ten yards apart — plenty of room for a compact car to weave through, but a comically-tight gap for a 50-foot behemoth to negotiate going forward, let alone in reverse. Even the slightest brush of one of the cones will result in a loss of points. It’s a circus act, and yet each of the buses that pass us by manages to slalom through with ease.
The Road-E-O has taken place annually since 1964, and the state’s website contains a full list of champions. A few things stand out in this unofficial hall of fame. J. Burton Haerr III put together a bit of a dynasty in the 1970s, winning four titles in succession. Gay Rogowski was the first to manage a perfect score in 1992, a feat no other driver has matched since. And the very next year, two drivers tied for first place, one of whom, Nick Darnell, was an alternate judge, and only decided to compete at the very last minute.
This year, 42 drivers — the top six finishers from seven regional events across the state of Ohio — are vying to add their name to that gilded list.
One of those competitors is Arlene Sandiford, representing the school district in Sylvania, a northwestern suburb of Toledo. Sandiford has driven school buses for the last 17 years. Previously, she worked odd jobs — cake decorator, childcare provider, grocery store cashier — but applied to become a driver upon advice from her uncle, who was working for the city’s public school district at the time.
Initially, she appreciated the fact that the job was compatible with her responsibilities as a parent. It even gave her a convenient opportunity to drive her own daughter to school each day. While some kids might not be too keen on the arrangement, Sandiford said her daughter didn’t mind riding to school with her mom and a busload of her peers. In fact, she loved it. And Sandiford loved it, too — so much so that she’s still in the driver’s seat, long after her daughter stopped riding the bus.
“I did not think I’d still be here 17 years [later], but I don’t really see myself doing anything else now,” Sandiford said. “Most people do not go into the education field of any caliber — from a superintendent all the way down to the cafeteria janitors, school bus drivers — they don’t go in it just for money … There’s something different about this.”
But Sandiford’s sense of job satisfaction is rapidly becoming a rarity in the world of school bus driving.
While employment has been in decline since 2009, school bus drivers began leaving the profession in droves in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. The national working population shrank by nearly 15% in just nine months in 2022, and while that trend has stabilized slightly in the years since, nearly one of every three school bus drivers who were employed in 2009 is no longer behind the wheel.
A 2023 national survey conducted by HopSkipDrive, an advocacy group for more reliable public school transportation, revealed that 92% of school administrators feel constrained by a limited supply of bus drivers. That percentage is up from 78% in 2021 and 88% in 2022.
What’s behind this mass school bus driver exodus?
There are a few leading causes for the labor shortage. The first is that the workforce is aging. A 2021 inventory of the working population determined that the average school bus driver was 54, 12 years older than the national average for all U.S. workers.
“I have five [drivers] within retirement age that could go any day if they chose,” Scott Brooker, the Director of Transportation for Springfield Schools in Holland, Ohio, said. “We need probably four or five just to fill current open spots, and we don’t have any subs.”
While he trusts his “great group” of veteran drivers, Brooker regularly has to step in to cover routes. He says he drives more than some of his full-time staff do.
The second major contributor to the school bus driver exodus is low pay. Sandiford, who now drives for Sylvania City Schools in Sylvania, Ohio, said there was a time earlier in her career when she wasn’t getting paid what she felt she was worth. While she is grateful to no longer be in that position, the average school bus driver has seen their income sag further and further below the national median over the past two decades.
The sporadic nature of the job only compounds the pay gap. Since school bus drivers rarely work a full 40-hour workweek (typically clocking closer to 32 hours per week), they routinely earn less than 60% of what the average American worker makes. Some school districts have begun offering their drivers shifts during the school day, sometimes as auxiliary janitors or cafeteria workers, but even those affordances can’t compensate for lost income over the summer months when schools aren’t in session.
Drivers can’t even be assured of the fact that their earnings will keep pace with the rising cost of living. The three-year average of weekly median wages for school bus drivers was nearly 3% lower in 2021 – 2023 than it was in the three years before the pandemic, while the same average for the rest of the workforce rose by 5%.
Given the harsh financial reality, it’s little surprise that districts have found it immensely difficult to hire and retain new drivers. Only 59% of all new drivers last more than two years behind the wheel, and less than a quarter drive for eight years or more.
School administrators like Brooker have been forced to find creative ways to drum up interest. Some districts have started stationing their buses in public places with high foot traffic to raise awareness of the staffing shortage. Brooker’s district even implemented a $500 bonus for new drivers for the 2024-25 school year and hosted a test drive event where community members could try driving the bus themselves.
“All we got to do is get you behind the wheel of the bus,” Brooker said, explaining the rationale behind the event. “Once you get behind the wheel, we will get you there.”
50 people turned up to give it a shot, but at the end of the day, Brooker only managed to secure one additional driver for his roster.
Back in the Westland High School parking lot, Chuck SantaMaria paces back and forth, a vessel of exuberant energy. He’s on the shorter side, with a scratchy, white goatee, and is sporting a black baseball cap and athletic sunglasses. SantaMaria only began driving school buses in his late forties. Before that, he owned a sandwich shop; before that, he worked as a home improvement salesperson.
Now, SantaMaria has enlisted as a judge for the diminishing clearance event, in which drivers must roll their vehicles through pairs of cones that narrow steadily until they’re only an inch wider than either side of the bus. There is virtually no room for error.
But once again, this seemingly impossible feat is a trifle for the competitors. SantaMaria and I watched as several drivers passed through the gauntlet completely unscathed. Perplexed, I asked him how they were making it look so easy.
“This one, if you practice it, you can do rather well,” SantaMaria said. “Just keep focused on one side.”
But there’s a difference between driving an empty bus and a full one.
“You know, bus drivers don’t talk about this,” SantaMaria said. “It’s all in the back of our heads. Children’s lives actually depend on us.”
SantaMaria’s connection to his students isn’t confined to the school day, either. After every child is safely deposited at home, SantaMaria and his wife — who is also a school bus driver — often return to school to see their students perform in concerts and plays.
The attention and care that SantaMaria gives to his kids in their everyday lives is returned to him in equal measure on his routes.
“By doing that with the kids, you know, they like and they respect you more,” SantaMaria said. “And then if there’s a problem and you tell them something, they tend to listen better.”
The Road-E-O might test technical skills, but school bus drivers need to be just as adept at behavior management — yet another challenge for a profession already struggling to retain and attract drivers.
“What you give is what you get,” Sandiford said. “So if you give me respect and you give me your good behavior, I’ll give you respect … I’ll open up to them. I’ll talk with them. I’ll laugh with them, but if I hear disrespect towards anybody else or myself, I’ll shut it all down.”
Sandiford is prepared to deal with misbehaving students — an essential skill for any school bus driver. But in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic, many drivers have reported that they’ve been having a difficult time connecting with and managing the students on their buses. According to Sandiford, the tactics and patterns of communication drivers used to rely on aren’t as effective as they once were.
“From when I started driving, the type of kids from now, these kids are completely different,” Sandiford said. “These babies went home for almost the whole school year, it seems like just about, with COVID, and … when they had basically summer for 15, 16 months, it was really hard to get them back into ‘Okay, this is how we ride the bus. This is what we need to do.’”
Several bus drivers I spoke with blamed the pandemic for the deterioration in on-bus behavior. Lockdown kept an entire class of students from learning appropriate bus conduct and allowed slightly older students to lose the habits they had already formed, but driver frustrations were also tied to what they interpreted as slack parenting during quarantine. Prior to the pandemic, students would generally heed instructions from their drivers. Now, they’re no longer quite so obedient.
Scott Brooker noted that his older drivers have been particularly impacted by this new dynamic.
“[They’re] set in their ways,” Brooker said. “A lot of them are [still saying], ‘I said, “Sit down.” Why aren’t you sitting? They’re not listening to me.’ Because when we were growing up, [when] the adult talked, we listened. We respected the adult.”
Now, Brooker says that respect has to be earned.
“If you don’t take the time to build that rapport with those kids, with the families, it’s going to be a rough ride for you.”
Arlene Sandiford has taken that maxim to heart. This year, she’s planning to share a questionnaire with each of her students to learn more about them — not only to collect essential information, like their names and emergency contacts, but also to gain more insight into their respective personalities. She’ll share her own answers with them, too.
“When you know your kids, and they know that you pay attention to them and they feel seen, they behave better,” Sandiford said.
Sandiford has also found that children behave better if you ply them with candy. At the beginning of each school year, she’ll buy as many treats as she can afford and apportion her stockpile to students who demonstrate consistent good behavior. Gradually, students will have to “act right” for longer intervals of time to receive those mouthwatering lollipops and gummy worms.
I told Sandiford that her methods were beginning to sound more like parenting than bus driving. She sighed in agreement.
“In the 45 minutes I have these kids on my bus, I can’t teach them how to ‘life,’” Sandiford said. “When I hear them making not so great decisions or talking about it, I’m like, ‘Now, let’s think about this.’ … And then the kids kind of stop and think about it, and it gets their minds processing. But I can’t do that every day in 45 minutes.”
But attending concerts and buying candy aren’t part of the job description, and even with so much extra effort, the return isn’t always positive.
“There have been many days I’ve gotten off that bus and cried in the seat until I was ready to go home,” Sandiford said. “But I always get up in the morning and come back, because if I don’t take them to school, who’s going to?”
Arlene Sandiford is asking the right question.
In 2020, rates of chronic absenteeism in U.S. schools hovered around 13%, but jumped to over 28% in 2022. While that percentage has decreased slightly since then, the most recent data available indicates that nearly a quarter of all students struggle to maintain consistent attendance.
The 2023 HopSkipDrive survey (which indicated that 74% of respondents saw a strong link between absenteeism and unreliable access to transportation) reported that students from lower-income households, students experiencing homelessness and students with special needs were overrepresented among the chronically absent.
Unsurprisingly, the survey also identified that students living greater distances from their schools were more likely to be experiencing absenteeism. But school bus driver shortages have made life difficult for families living in closer proximity to schools, too. In Ohio, the school district in North Ridgeville recently eliminated bus service for all students living within two miles of their school last year. The policy forced some children as young as 9 to walk to class on busy roads.
The shortage has also had an impact on Ohio’s Road-E-O. In recent years, fewer and fewer drivers have shown up to the regional competitions, evidence that passionate folks like Sandiford, Brooker and SantaMaria are now outliers in their profession. But even as the number of drivers continues to shrink, the competitors at state still display an intense attachment to their jobs.
Brooker has qualified for state in each of the last three years, and, after a dismal first outing in 2023 (“I got too confident and too cocky, just like most rookies do”), he placed tenth in 2024. This year, he has his sights set even higher.
The Road-E-O offers Brooker the chance to do what he loves, and to do it well. It celebrates good drivers, and drives home some lessons that apply outside the high school parking lot.
“You just have to know the bus,” Brooker said. “You have to know those mirrors. You have to understand that pivot point. And that’s where the Road-E-O really helps fine-tune those so that when you’re in the real world, in a situation, [you can say] ‘Hey, I can get out of this situation.”
Back on the course, Arlene Sandiford brings her bus to a halt in front of the serpentine. Brandon Anness gives her the go-ahead, and the vehicle lurches into gear and creeps forward. Sandiford then pilots the forty-foot bus through the cones with more dexterity than most sedans could muster.
Anness notes that she’s doing quite well, but that comes as no surprise — the serpentine is Sandiford’s signature event.
“Some people don’t feel it’s easy,” Sandiford told me a few days before the competition. “There’s really no secret. I mean, it’s just common knowledge. Watch your mirrors, and know where that back tire is going to be.”
Having passed through the serpentine going forward, Sandiford then does the event in reverse, comes to a stop and lays on the horn. Anness confers with the other judge, fills out a scorecard and sends Sandiford on her way to the rest of the course.
When the scores were tabulated at the end of the afternoon, Sandiford ended up placing fifth. She was thrilled.
“This is what I came for,” Sandiford said. “I got what I came for. I’m going to bed happy tonight.”
For the 18th consecutive fall, Sandiford knows she’ll be the only reason that busloads of kids make it to school every day. But that pressure is a privilege for the fifth-best school bus driver in all of Ohio.
