Julie Abeyta is no stranger to driving a bus, having served Lewis-palmer School District 38 for more than a decade. But when she found herself stuck in a snowbank en route to pick up elementary students one January day, she wasn’t a bus driver.

She was the transportation supervisor, head of the department, sent out on a snowy day to cover a route with no driver.

D-38 has 29 full-time drivers, supplemented by 10 utility drivers who pitch in as needed, but Abeyta’s office is trained to drive and meet the need in an understaffed department. Flu season and inclement weather present the biggest challenges, often pulling administrators such as herself — and the co-worker who came to her aid that snowy day — onto the road.

“Everybody who comes into the office, every one of us, including myself, has to be willing to drive,” Abeyta said. “I’m not going to ask anything of anybody that I wouldn’t be willing to do myself.”

Pikes Peak-area schools are in dire need of bus drivers. Abeyta’s team at D-38 is short five of the 22 regular bus route drivers. Every day, the transportation department must find a way to cover about a quarter of its regular routes.

Nevertheless, Abeyta has

never canceled a route in her year and a half of leadership.

“We joke in the office that we’re the emergency response team, because you have to be able to run at a moment’s notice, go rescue somebody,” Assistant Transportation Supervisor Mike Schad said.

Meeting the need

Homicide detectives, firefighters, police officers and lieutenant colonels stand among the ranks of Lewis– Palmer’s bus drivers. D-38 relies heavily on retired professionals or those on their second jobs who are looking to give back to the community. While the transportation department is not fully staffed, it has managed to scrape together enough drivers to meet each day’s need.

Not every district is so fortunate.

Just south of Monument, neighboring Academy School District 20 recently announced a divisive plan to change its school start and end times. The measure will in part alleviate strains on the district’s overstrained transportation department, which lacks seven bus drivers and six other transportation staff members.

This school year, D-20 tightened its routes to reduce the number of buses needed by 14. During the 2021-22 school year, 25 transportation office staff members drove a school bus every day of the year to combat the shortage.

Even so, the shortage has forced D-20 to drastically reduce its number of activity buses, which deliver students to events like sports or field trips, and even cancel regular bus routes some mornings.

“That’s not an uncommon thing,” Abeyta said. “I don’t want it to be on my watch. I don’t want it to happen.”

Though meeting the immediate need, D-38 is running on fumes as it consolidates existing routes and holds off on adding others until it can fill its vacancies, Abeyta said. Parents often email her asking for additional routes, which is an impossibility under current conditions.

In her quest to fill vacant driver positions, Abeyta loosened hiring standards to meet community members halfway. Applicants tend to prefer utility driving positions, which cover activity trips and fill in for regular route drivers as needed.

Rather than pushing applicants away for failing to commit to a full-time Monday-friday route schedule, the district invites utility drivers to serve as long-term subs to help cover a route several times a week.

Pat Plagman is among the crop of 10 utility drivers who negotiated loosened schedules this academic year. Plagman, who retired last spring after 10 years as a route driver, received a call from Abeyta at the start of the year, urging him to come back due to the shortage. He obliged, serving two weeks each month as a utility driver whose schedule changes weekly.

“To know that those kids have enjoyed me as their bus driver, and even recently I had one of the kids that I’d just been driving a couple of weeks say, ‘Mr. Pat, can you be our permanent bus driver? We like you,’” Plagman said. “You know, little tidbits like that make it worth it.”

Schedules are set weeks, even months, in advance, according to Abeyta, but things rarely go as planned. People call in sick or take personal days, others quit or retire, and before long the schedule has changed two or three times in a day.

Some weeks are marked as “maxed out” on the schedule, indicating there is no wiggle room for a sick or personal day. February is looking tight in that regard.

“You can’t panic,” Abeyta said. “You just gotta make it work.”

‘Not just driving the bus’

Plagman plays the role of local celebrity when he’s out in Monument. Students spanning his decade of work point him out to their parents or stop him to say hi, sometimes several feet taller and hardly recognizable. They still recognize him.

“It’s not just driving the bus,” Plagman said. “There’s a lot more involved.

His star status results from a delicate balance between transporting students safely, showing interest in their lives through friendly conversation and giving the occasional disciplinary talk.

“The driver’s responsibility is so much greater than I think most people realize, even people who are within the district and don’t work in transportation,” said Schad, the assistant supervisor. “It’s a tremendous responsibility. Huge, and unfortunately the pay is not equivalent to the responsibilities.”

Bus drivers in D-38 make between $16 and $17.44 an hour, depending on experience.

A love of kids and community, perhaps unsurprisingly, are paramount to the role. Before beginning the training process, applicants will join a bus driver for a ride-along to see firsthand if they have the chops for the gig.

“All that pent-up energy from sitting in class all day comes out on my bus,” said Michael Leland, who completed his training in 2022.

Not everybody is equipped to handle the energy of dozens of elementary schoolers. The transportation team has had applicants return from their ride-alongs and walk straight from one door to the other without so much as a word, never to be seen again.

For others, like Abeyta, student management is part of the draw.

“You shouldn’t be a bus driver if you don’t like kids because sometimes that’s the only thing that keeps you going,” Abeyta said. “You can’t just sit behind the wheel and ignore the kids behind you. That defeats the whole purpose of being a bus driver.”