School buses this year are struggling to handle the growing number of students that we have and it seems there is no end in sight.

Fifty-five adult riders or seventy-two children are supposed to fit on a school bus. With well over fifty-five students taking the bus this year seating conditions have gradually gotten worse (firstcharterbus.com). 

 Jared Hofmann and Jordyn Roy, seniors at Woodbridge High School say the amount of students supposed to fit in the seats is absurd and the three-seaters fit two students at most and the two-seaters fit one student. 

“It seems like some bus stops have doubled in the number of students that take them. I think they are grouping together bus stops because of the shortage of buses,” Roy said.

Hofmann has described his experience taking the school bus this year as “horrible”, going on to say “Ever since school started this year I’ve had to stand up every day on the bus because there is no room anywhere for me to sit and now I just sit on the floor because I’m tired of standing.”

Now while school buses have always had a lot of kids on them, there seems to be more this year when compared to others.

The reason this is happening is that there aren’t enough bus drivers to meet the needs of the school. Since the full restart of school after the pandemic, there haven’t been enough bus drivers to keep up with the number of people who need to take the bus. 

The sudden decrease in bus drivers is due to the unemployment rate being so high.

New Jersey is among the top states when it comes to unemployment rates (northjersey.com), and this is because people can make the same amount of money collecting unemployment as they would working a full-time job. Something prolonging the hiring of bus drivers is how hard it is to get a commercial driver’s license and that it can take up to sixty days to get.

It is expected that jobs will start to fill again as unemployment pay decreases but only time will tell.