The Knox Community School Board hopes to motivate school bus drivers to take on extra-curricular driving trips with a pay increase they implemented during their meeting earlier this week. Before the pay increase, the rate of pay for field trip drivers was only about 65 cents more than minimum wage.
Bus drivers sacrifice a lot of their own time and are responsible for feeding themselves when they take students on these trips. Superintendent Dr. William Reichhart acknowledged that the school corporation is having trouble finding drivers who are willing to take field trips due to time constraints as well as insufficient compensation.
He proposed the pay increases to remedy that issue, “What I would like to do is propose that for the school year of 2017-18 that we would increase that to $9 and we could either do it and leave it at that or you could make it a two step recommendation then for the ‘18-‘19 school year it would then bump up to $10 an hour.”
The board unanimously approved both steps. Bus drivers will receive $9 an hour this school year and the hope is that the proposed increase for the 2018-19 school year will encourage bus drivers to continuously take on extracurricular trips in the future.
