Webinar Replay #86: Best Practices for Recruiting and Retaining School Bus Drivers

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Steve Kessler: Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the INFINITI. Workforce solutions. Fast forward. Webinar Series. My name is Steve Kessler, and I’m going to host the program. Today, we’re very excited to have you all join us. I think today is a topic that is always on the minds of people involved in pupil transportation. And we’re going to talk today about the best practices for recruiting and retaining school bus drivers.

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Steve Kessler: I was telling our guest just a few minutes ago. I’ve been with this company INFINITI

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Steve Kessler: for coming up on 21 years in May, and I don’t recall a time that we didn’t hear from our school districts about their need for school bus drivers. It seems to be an issue that continues and goes on and on, and we’ve got.

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Steve Kessler: I think, an expert that’s going to help us, at least with some ideas on best practices on how to be successful in in making sure we have the right bus drivers for our schools. A couple of housekeeping things before I introduce our guest.

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Steve Kessler: Everybody that’s logged in this morning is muted so we can’t hear you if you would like to communicate with us. There’s a chat box there that you have access to, and you can type in your comments or questions. There’s also a Q. And a box in the trade, and you can use that if you wish to pose a question.

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Steve Kessler: and we’ll see those here on our side, and then we’ll be able to respond to those questions, and we’ll probably take those towards the end of the program. So why don’t you all jump on the chat and just tell us who you are and who you’re with and where you are. So, we have some idea who’s out there.

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Steve Kessler: and while you all are doing that. I’m going to introduce our guest, and we’re very fortunate to have Craig Beaver join us this morning.

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Steve Kessler: Craig currently serves as the administrator for transportation at the Beaverton School district in Beaverton, Oregon.

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Steve Kessler: Craig has over 40 years of experience in both private and public transportation. Sectors

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Steve Kessler: Craig oversees Oregon’s largest district-owned school bus fleet.

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Steve Kessler: His team comprises over 300 employees and 320 buses.

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Steve Kessler: transporting 25,000 students daily and covering over 3 million miles annually. So, it’s a very large district with lots of buses. In 2024 Craig was honored as the transportation director of the year by school transportation news. I’m sure you’re all familiar with that. Under his leadership Beaverton became the 1st school district in Oregon

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Steve Kessler: to introduce electric school buses in 2021.

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Steve Kessler: Currently the district operates 45 electric buses on daily routes and has installed 70 level 2 and level 3 DC. Fast chargers.

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Steve Kessler: In 2024, the district received a 20 million dollars grant from the EPA Clean School bus program to replace 50 Diesel buses with electric ones aiming to have 90 electric buses in service. By January of 2026, the remaining fleet is powered by propane and Diesel, utilizing renewable Diesel, which is R. 99, or renewable propane.

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Steve Kessler: So, having said that, Craig, I’m going to turn it over to you, sir. Welcome.

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Craig Beaver: Thank you, Steve. That’s quite an introduction. Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me. I’m more than happy to talk about this. And hopefully, today we’ve tried some unique things here at Beaverton over the past 10 years, and in my prior life as well. And I’ll give you some examples, and hopefully, it’ll spur some ideas for you to use as well. Again. Steve’s detailed, as far as my current

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Craig Beaver: employment just quick. A little bit earlier before that, after I graduated from college, I went to work for a company called Roadway Express, a very large trucking company. I spent 17 years there

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Craig Beaver: as a supervisor, terminal manager, and industrial engineer, and then I. From there I went to a smaller school district, gross Mart Union High School district in San Diego, California, about 20,000 kids, and I spent 15 years there and then I came up here for the past 10. So pat I had always been in transportation, and hiring has always been the number one thing in the last 40 years. So

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Craig Beaver: today we’ll talk about best practices. So, with that we’ll kick off a little bit. Here, let me go forward, and there is us again. There’s Steve and I. And this

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Craig Beaver: this quote is something that I remembered, and I preached to everybody that works for me, and I have since the mid-eighties, when you think you have enough drivers hire more

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Craig Beaver: that came from the terminal manager I had back in roadway. And it’s true. Then, as it is today

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Craig Beaver: again. You never have enough people, even though you think you might. So, jumping into it, starting off with kind of the hiring part of it.

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Craig Beaver: you know what the important things that we found are message and presentation, and message and presentation.

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Craig Beaver: We need to catch your eye. We need to catch our audience. So, we found our best luck with striking. You know the ad or the advertisement, or whether it’s radio, TV, whatever it is, needs to strike an emotional chord

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Craig Beaver: and show. You know that the position

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Craig Beaver: makes a difference. We highlight giving back to the community, we try and make it personal

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Craig Beaver: as much as we can to folks or have them so they can personalize it. And by what? That? By that, what I mean is that it affects their lives, how it affects their families.

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Craig Beaver: As far as the basic presentations are concerned, things we talk about make sure it’s eye catching, and that somehow it stands apart. It’s a little bit different than everybody else.

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Craig Beaver: We always like humor and emotion, if it’s at all possible. We try and do some humorous stuff, although with a school district it’s a fine line.

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Craig Beaver: We had some ideas. You’ll see some examples that we thought, and then we thought better of it. They were kind of fun

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Craig Beaver: in that emotion. Again, we found that highlighting our students, especially our younger students

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Craig Beaver: in the elementary age students tend to strike a chord with folks.

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Craig Beaver: I think I think it’s safe to say we all want to protect those kids, the smallest ones. We want to protect them. And that’s a universal emotion, I think. And that’s something that we can. We can tap into

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Craig Beaver: and then, lastly, we really want to highlight our product. And our product is the kids

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Craig Beaver: and so, we try and feature kids in some shape or form in what we do.

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Craig Beaver: Whether it’s just riding the bus, boarding the bus, getting off the bus things like that.

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Craig Beaver: And again, you have to manage that our district has, especially with the FERPA laws and things like that. The privacy laws our district defaults too. We can A parent agrees that

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Craig Beaver: they can share the likeness and image of the student.

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Craig Beaver: The district can do that unless they choose to opt out of that. And so, during the registration process every year there’s a box they can check. So, if you’re not sure what your district’s policy is on, that strongly recommend that you check into it. Personally, you know. What we found is, if we’re not sure we will, we will consider them that they have not given their approval, and that we will. You know we’ll go through those first.st We want to err on the side of caution.

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Craig Beaver: One of the big things is targeting our ads as far as who is our audience going to be? It’s important to know who our audience is going to be

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Craig Beaver: when you know when it’s truck drivers. It’s different. It’s, you know, that’s a that could be. That’s a career for most people where we’ll have primary breadwinners. So will be all ages

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Craig Beaver: and for school bus drivers.

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Craig Beaver: It may. You know, we may have the same issue. When I was in San Diego. We had, at least half, probably 2 thirds of the workforce. Where were primary breadwinners, they were younger on the age scale.

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Craig Beaver: Pardon me, so it was very important for them

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Craig Beaver: for a life, you know, a lifelong career, and so wages was a high, was a very high motivator for them to come to work for us.

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Craig Beaver: Working conditions were a high motivator.

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Craig Beaver: Benefits were good, but that wasn’t generally the primary thing that they were looking for when I came up to Beaverton that kind of changed, and I’ll kind of show you. So, this is ours. This is our demographic right now, as we stand right now, and this has been pretty much the same. For the 10 years I’ve been here, as you can see, you know, our single largest percentage of folks.

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Craig Beaver: 20% of our folks between 60 and 64. So here in Beaverton what we found is that

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Craig Beaver: This tends to be a second or 3rd career for most people

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Craig Beaver: in this Beaverton is a suburb of Portland, Oregon. We’re about 10 miles west of Portland, Oregon. We are the whole, you know. Beaverton is the home to Intel major manufacturing plants here for Intel, 3 or 4 of them. It’s also the World headquarters of Nike.

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Craig Beaver: We’re in an area that’s called the Silicon Forest.

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Craig Beaver: So, it’s 1 step below Silicon Valley. But it’s just as active up here, a lot of technology and that type of thing and

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Craig Beaver: and computer driven and support. So, we get a lot of folks like that. And

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Craig Beaver: many of those folks

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Craig Beaver: you know, in years past have done very well in that in that field, and have retired early, or been able to, you know, been able to leave their jobs. And they may still be young. They may be in their forties or fifties, and they’re looking for something else. They’re too young for social security. So, they’re looking for benefits primarily so.

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Craig Beaver: I guess this is a long way of saying benefits is probably our single prime, highest driver for our employees here, if you ask anybody, and as a school district we employee must work 30 HA week is a minimum to

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Craig Beaver: you know, to qualify for benefits for full benefits which are

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Craig Beaver: in our district. They’re fully paid

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Craig Beaver: depending on what plan that you that you get.

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Craig Beaver: and they’re very good benefits. And so, we make sure that all of our routes have a minimum 30 h guarantee. Now that was a decision that the district made

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Craig Beaver: about 10 years ago, when I came on board. Pardon me to bring everybody up to guarantee the benefits, and that was a tremendous help for us in our hiring right away.

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Craig Beaver: But so those are, you know, some important things to look at. But you know the message of this is between, you know, 50 and 60 years old. There is, you know, a significant portion of us of our employees. So

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Craig Beaver: and I will highlight that, you know we still have employees, or even over 75 that are still working in Oregon. Once you turn 70, you must get tested every year. And we have still had folks that do that. So, it can be. You know, it can be a great career for folks as a second or 3rd one.

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Craig Beaver: So

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Craig Beaver: the next thing we’re going to talk about a little bit is kind of the modes. How do we message?

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Craig Beaver: Different things that we do? And so, the things that we’ve done here is

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Craig Beaver: the most obvious is our district website, and this is you know, is, probably everybody has a website, and it’s the most common way of doing it. We make sure that you know we’re we have a 260-day posting. It’s a year-round posting we always try and make sure it’s up near the top as far as the level. You know the cat. The

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Craig Beaver: the category of posting that school bus drivers are up near the top. We’ve tried and we continue to use several other web-based services are

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Craig Beaver: indeed! And Craigslist are the 2 biggest ones that we use. This happens to be a

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Craig Beaver: indeed. Add

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Craig Beaver: I couldn’t get it to print. Normally, you know. Usually at the top, it’s got a picture of a bus or something on it. But essentially, this is the kind of thing. So, 1 1 tip that we found and that we do is a lot of districts tend to just regurgitate the job description on to the for their ad.

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Craig Beaver: And a job description, you know, it reads like a job. Description must do this must do that, and what we’ve done is we kind of we tried to, you know, kind of make that more conversational right? And we talked about personalizing it, you know. Do you have good communication skills working with children of all ages? And that’s why I talk about personalizing it

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Craig Beaver: and trying to find your audience and trying to strike a chord. We highlight that. There’s no, you know, no experience necessary. I imagine almost everybody has an in-house training system that they’re able to train their own folks and get them certified. And so, we want to highlight that. We also pay them. They get

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Craig Beaver: basically, they’re a 4 hour employee while they’re in training. So again, that’s something to highlight. If your district. Does that

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Craig Beaver: another thing that we did especially during coming out of the pandemic?

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Craig Beaver: Is we also reimburse them upon completion? And they got their

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Craig Beaver: commercial license, the school bus certificate and they pass, and they were a full-fledged bus driver. We went back and reimburse them for their

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Craig Beaver: for their

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Craig Beaver: expenses. So, we paid for upgrading to the CDL. We paid for the written test

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Craig Beaver: for the commercial license, and for the S Endorsement, the B endorsement and the school bus driver endorsement. And so, in Oregon it was about $200 for that. It’s gone up here to about $280. And so, we hire about 60 or 70 people a year.

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Craig Beaver: And so, you know, it’s $10 to $15,000 a year, but it’s worth it. Because if that’s gets more people in and to stay with us, then it’s that’s a that’s a cost that we’ll take. You know that it makes it worthwhile

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Craig Beaver: we’ve also thought about in a couple of different places. We’ve thought about some sort of agreement that if we’re going to reimburse you, that you sign a promissory note or a pledge to stay with us for a year that gets in a little gray area from a legal standpoint. If you can do that at your district, that’s something else to think about.

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Craig Beaver: Yeah, we have some.

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Craig Beaver: We’ve got a couple of examples. I didn’t put them in here. But if you’re interested you can send me an email and contact me. I’ll be happy to send you what we have. If you think you can do that in your district. But that’s always a, you know, if you can lock somebody in for 12 months after you, you pay to reimburse them. That’s a good thing.

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Craig Beaver: You know, government posting boards unemployment office. That kind of thing hasn’t had a lot of luck with that. But again, it’s available, it’s free. We also use. I’ve also gone out to colleges.

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Craig Beaver: junior colleges, community colleges, and four-year universities, and gotten on there. Gotten them to post it up on their job board. Whether it’s in the old days it was an actual posting on a bulletin board. Now it’s an electronic post, you know. We’ve done career fairs. We’ve gone out with a table, for you know, 2 or 3 hours, and sat at a career fair, and again looking for the part-time folks. I bet everybody

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Craig Beaver: has people, or maybe even yourself that you started as a student start as a part time as a student, and you graduated, and you just wound up hanging around. And it turned into a career, and everybody’s got those stories.

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Craig Beaver: our district included. So that you know, that’s kind of where it gets started.

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Craig Beaver: Transit buses and light rail. Those are our favorites. That’s something we got into a couple of years ago. We are in direct competition with our transit agency here in Oregon. It’s called in Portland area. It’s called TriMet, an extremely large public transit agency. And so, we’re in direct competition with them for drivers.

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Craig Beaver: And they, you know they pay better than we do our benefits. Packages are better than theirs. Our hours are much better, and we like to think our riders are a lot better than their riders are. We don’t have anybody pulling a knife on us or getting on the bus inebriated. So, we try and highlight those when we make those comparisons with folks.

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Craig Beaver: Bus benches were a big one for us. We especially like the Bus Bench, because it’s sort of the gift that keeps giving

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Craig Beaver: and as you’ll see here in a few minutes, I have some slides and whatnot, and this is billing. So, we pay for a bus bed, let’s say, for 4 weeks, or for 8 weeks.

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Craig Beaver: And then we’re done. And so, the ads on the bench. But if nobody comes behind you and rents that bench, then your ad continues to stay there, and so we have several benches that you know we paid for maybe 8 weeks, and the ad stayed on for a year and a half, because no other, you know, no other. Nobody else came behind came behind us and wanted those locations or whatnot

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Craig Beaver: and again, it’s important that if you do bus benches that you work with your work with the ad agency or the

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Craig Beaver: the

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Craig Beaver: you know the transit company to pick your spots. I mean, we only picked 12 or 14. But there are key spots in our district in our area.

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Craig Beaver: you know, there were high traffic, high vehicle traffic areas, and it worked out really? Well, so we really like the Bus Bench and people get a kick out of seeing that

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Craig Beaver: billboards. We even do billboards nowadays. It’s a lot easier to get an electronic billboard than it is the traditional big ad up there. Those spaces are really limited. And they’re expensive. And the folks that get them tend not to give them up on the companies that get them. But with electronic billboards you know, we’ve seen them both on. We have them on the highway and on the freeway. We’ve seen them or on the highway.

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Craig Beaver: and then also on major thoroughfares in the city.

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Craig Beaver: And I think you know it’s a combination of you can flash it up there for 10 seconds, or even up to 30 seconds, and there’s a price range there for how long you have it up there for each instance, and for how long? Over the course of time, days or weeks, that you run it as well again, kind of more at the expense of end. But you know, especially coming out of the pandemic, we were desperate. We were 40 drivers short.

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Craig Beaver: and that meant we had 40 uncovered routes every day that we had staff driving.

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Craig Beaver: I’m fortunate that everybody here has a commercial license and a school bus driver certificate, with the exception of about 4 people. So, of those 300 people, 296 of them can drive a bus if we must. So, unfortunately, we had to put our techs out driving routes a lot of times. Coming out of the pandemic. I drove the daily routes. My supervisors, my staff

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Craig Beaver: so, we were desperate. And so, we did that. And then the last thing, and probably the least effective, is newspapers, mailers, church bulletins, that kind of thing again. Mailers, you know. I again I’m not an advertising Guru, but I do remember. You know, if you get a 3% response in the mailer. That’s pretty darn good.

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Craig Beaver: You know. If you send it out to, you know, 25, or 50,000 people or households, or whatever. So, we did the mailers. We even did the newspapers when I 1st started not very effective at all, but we tried everything. Church bulletins.

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Craig Beaver: again. It’s you know you. You buy a small, you know, quarter box or half box, and it stays in there for a month. It’s not expensive, and it reaches more people than you would think it reaches. So

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Craig Beaver: I wanted to give you a flavor of the indeed job posting. So, this was just

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Craig Beaver: February. And I ran this. This is the number of clicks from February 1st to February 23rd

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Craig Beaver: And again, I’m not an expert with clicks and all that stuff, but I do know that you know, we had anywhere from about a

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Craig Beaver: low of 35-38 folks up to a hundred, you know 120 folks at least, clicking on our ad. Type of thing. So

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Craig Beaver: you know, if you choose to go that way, especially, indeed, they have a service. You can pay for that help. You manage that and do those types of things, but kind of gives you an idea. It’s, you know, people are always clicking on things, and it’s just a good way to get out in front. Get out in front.

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Craig Beaver: So, one of the other things, since we have 56 schools in our district. And so, we took advantage of those. And this is what one of our banners, our 4 feet by 12-foot fence banner looks like.

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Craig Beaver: you know, our original banner was

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Craig Beaver: transportation department. Now, hiring, call this number or go to this website. And so, we went to our graphic designer and our communications department and came up with a better idea. And this is what it was. Again, we talk about being eye-catching, focusing on some of the things the kids do. So, we did that by bus. One of the things we found is that folks?

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Craig Beaver: there’s a tendency to put too much information on a banner. People are driving by it. They may see it for 2, 3 seconds, and so it’s got to be short. It’s got to be directed. Really highlighting the big things, you want them to see.

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Craig Beaver: which was at this time the rates have gone up, but when we put this one out 23 to $30 per hour, that usually catches awry the 0 cost health benefits for your full family and the guaranteed hours. Those were the 3 big selling points for our district, and we wanted to highlight them, as you can see again. So, we have some contrasting colors there. But it’s still. Our colors are black and gold. You can see pretty much, but it fits really well with the school bus.

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Craig Beaver: and then when the QR codes. That’s where you know, you can really get into the details with the QR codes, and we make a reference to that. So that’s something to think about. I think. You know our banners. I’ve got about a dozen locations up.

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Craig Beaver: And you know, I think a banner like that. It’s Vinyl it’s got davits in it, you know, so you can

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Craig Beaver: tie it down to the fence or strap it to the fence, and I think something like that. The setup cost is the is the initial cost. That might be $1,500 for the setup, but once you have it set up to reproduce it, it might be, you know, 250 to $300. Maybe. So. It’s economical. And if you continue to, you know, to do it, it’s easy. We’ve updated, for example, the earn the per hour. We’ve updated that a couple of times.

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Craig Beaver: and they’ve charged us a minimal amount just to change that number, because the main setup is still the same. So, the only

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Craig Beaver: pitfall to this is just putting the banner up, you know, kind of post and forget.

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Craig Beaver: We found that, you know, at least every year we need to move the banner, whether it’s just move it up the fence or down the fence or to the left or to the right. You need to move the banner at least once a year, twice a year is better, just because after a while it becomes part of the background, and people don’t see it anymore. So that was kind of a key thing that we found as well. So, I have. My training staff goes out during the summer, and literally they may only move it 10 feet, but it’s just in a different place, and it catches somebody’s eye.

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Craig Beaver: This is an example of the mass mailing. We did, and as you can see, I don’t know if

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Craig Beaver: there we go. I don’t know if my there we go as you can see

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Craig Beaver: We did it.

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Craig Beaver: We were going to try and do one side in English, the other side in Spanish.

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Craig Beaver: and again, in all languages. You know there’s people up here. We have 106 different languages spoken in our district, but we can’t do that. Obviously. So, we chose the prime, you know the biggest single language which happens to be Spanish in our area in your area, it might be a different language. So instead of doing one side in English, the other side in another language we took the tack of

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Craig Beaver: of just, you know, kind of put them together, as you can see in English, and then the foreign language underneath it. It was very effective. And again, we’re focusing on what’s important right, the full-time positions insurance, you know the paid holiday, sick leave and personal time off. We found that it was very important to highlight that as well. And the work schedule following a school calendar, you know we could say summers off.

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Craig Beaver: It says the same thing. But when you say the work schedule follows a school calendar or something along those lines pick tying it to kids. You know, we always talk about it. Well, moms are great people to have the school bus drivers. That’s true, right? But that’s how we can really make that connection a lot better. And get that thought going

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Craig Beaver: and again, we want to try and highlight kids, you know, in our little drawing there you can see the kids in the bus and trying to make it fun, that kind of thing.

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Craig Beaver: And again, the QR code. You can get in the details there. So, this was the smaller version of what the smaller thing was, what was on the flip side of this. And we made sure this was the glossy paper.

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Craig Beaver: It makes a difference. So, if it gets wet, you know it’s not going to run off. But we sent this out 2 different times. It wasn’t that expensive. It was probably 5 or 600 bucks. Maybe I want to say it was under a thousand and I think we sent it to our district area, and then we also sent it to a couple of zip codes that were bordering our district, and that’s how it was sent out. Sent out is by zip codes, because this goes to the Us. Post service.

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Craig Beaver: and you can even choose the zip codes. We didn’t send it to every zip code in our area because we have a lot of rural areas or areas where there’s not that many houses. And so, we, you know, made sure we didn’t send it there. So, we focused on key zip codes that had high concentration of folks.

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Craig Beaver: billboards. These are a couple of examples of the billboards we went with again highlighting the major the major points, and then this time we chose to highlight our drivers and highlight the diversity of our drivers. So, these are these 3 of our drivers that we have, and, as you can see.

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Craig Beaver: depending on where the billboard was at, we chose to go with the most used language, you know we have, and I’m sure you do, too. We have certain areas that in our case Spanish is spoken more prevalently than English is. And so, we want to capitalize on that. And that’s what we did in Spanish.

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Craig Beaver: Even though Spanish may be the primary language. Most folks still speak English right, and can speak English to in order, you know, from a working environment it can still function and work that way. So, we chose to highlight that. So again

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Craig Beaver: it gets the message very clear, but more importantly, as well. It also pushes them. You know, the fact that we’re a diverse welcoming organization. And while I know that may not be the most

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Craig Beaver: in

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Craig Beaver: positive matter in in message thing right now it’s something that you know our school district believes in, I would venture to say, almost all school districts believe in. And so, we want to capitalize on that

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Craig Beaver: some of the other things we talked about, some of the fun ideas we had here were some thoughts that we thought we tried for. Our billboards. I’ll let you take a moment to look at those.

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Craig Beaver: so, what’s an idea? Again, using the side of a bus and come up with a pithy phrase, or or something humorous.

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Craig Beaver: You know we

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Craig Beaver: yeah, we kind of like that one. You’ll never take your work home with you. In fact, that would be illegal. We thought that was kind of funny, but then, you know, as far as an ad campaign, probably not the best ad campaign. But again, the point here is maybe come up with something that’s that works for you. And humor is always a

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Craig Beaver: humor is something, you know, a key that people remember they chuckle at. That’s you need that one thing, you know, to keep them in your mind to differentiate, differentiate, differentiate you from others.

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Craig Beaver: Remember, there’s

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Craig Beaver: city buses out there driving around hundreds of city buses. Drive around the very front of it, says we are hiring, and $7,500 bonus. Right? It’s going to be on the bus. They, you know, that says that. And it flashes and people see that all the time. So that’s you know, in our case, that’s our single biggest one.

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Craig Beaver: I wanted to give you an idea of costs here. So, this one was for

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Craig Beaver: let’s see, this was for park benches, I believe.

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Craig Beaver: Yeah. So, this one was

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Craig Beaver: for the benches, and you can kind of see the prices on it. This was for them to run a 4-week increments. And so, you can see, we had

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Craig Beaver: about. Let’s see a dozen, yeah, about a dozen, $6,300 for the month. So

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Craig Beaver: you know, I’ve we spent on the average, we spent probably about $12,000. You know, we budget for $12,000 a year, you know a thousand dollars a month, but you know, when we’re hurting, you know, we went as high as $50,000, you know, a year for advertising, and you know it’s worth the cost. If you get people out of it, it’s worth it. And the way I you know the way I can justify it is, you know, what’s the cost for my supervisor or I to drive the school route?

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Craig Beaver: You know the loss of productivity. And what that actual cost is.

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Craig Beaver: You make up that $6,300 quick.

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Craig Beaver: Here are some of our park benches. This is what we work with.

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Craig Beaver: And again, we kind of broke it up. We didn’t go with all the same. I’m sorry. Bus benches, not park benches, bus benches. We didn’t go with all the same message we wanted to, you know, because it was pretty much in the same area. We wanted people to see a different thing. So that’s kind of what we went with again.

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Craig Beaver: Paid training. You can see the one where we, you know no experience paid training fees reimbursed really try to hit on that hit more of the finance part of it

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Craig Beaver: and again, I really like the one on the right incorporates. You know, the side of the school bus.

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Craig Beaver: There’s nothing else like the side of the school bus, right that you’re going to remember that. So, we thought that was really important. And then the one that I got the most response on. Believe it or not. Was that

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Craig Beaver: so?

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Craig Beaver: There’s something just kind of

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Craig Beaver: kind of sweet about putting a ad for a school bus driver on the back of the transit bus. It’s just something sweet about that. I don’t know what to say, but so we went with 2 different kinds. We went with the rear one on the left, which was less expensive. That’s about 3 by 4, I think, or 2 and a yeah, about 3 foot by 4 foot.

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Craig Beaver: Again. It’s pretty much the same thing that was on the bus bench, and then we went with the side ad, which is on the driver’s side, which is the side you want. That’s the side that’s out. Everybody sees, for the most part, that one’s what they call a king. I think the ad is about 14 feet long, I think.

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Craig Beaver: And about 3 feet tall, and that really gets the rise, too. But we you know this, we got a lot of talk on this we got. We have got a lot of people when we know everybody we ask. We say, you know, where did you see ours? Where did you hear about us from? And we follow that. And when this was out, amazingly enough, we got a lot of response from this. And

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Craig Beaver: you know, we got a lot of chuckles, especially from my peers and other districts and district staff. They thought that it was kind of humorous, that we were advertising on the school bus. So, what was funny is that on the transit bus

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Craig Beaver: on the back of this bus or on the side it says, you know, be a school bus driver, and literally on the front of this bus, where they put the route up on the electronic board. It says, now hiring $7,500 bonus so you know, they saw that, and they kind of flipped out. But fortunately, the advertising department is separate from the Operations department. So, we didn’t have anybody tearing our ads off. But

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Craig Beaver: those were. Those were something we did. Another thing that we did was radio, so we did a radio ad. And if hopefully, you can hear this

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Craig Beaver: upgrade your career with great pay, excellent benefits, and the best work hours around. When you apply to be a bus driver for the Beaverton School district. The Beaverton School district needs drivers. Now apply at the human resources page at Beaverton, K12 or us.

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Craig Beaver: So that was also we did that. We also did

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Craig Beaver: But space in on television as well.

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Craig Beaver: It wasn’t as expensive as you would have thought. We went with

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Craig Beaver: like between 2 spots between the between the 4 o’clock and 5 o’clock hour. News hour is what we went with, and let me get back here

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Craig Beaver: between the 4 and 5 o’clock hour, like the 1st half hour. There is one in the second half hour. Those are about 10 second spots, I think.

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Craig Beaver: And so again just reaching out. We didn’t really get a lot of feedback on that one. I thought I had the radio one on there. But the radio one is really similar to that, and we also did it in Spanish as well.

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Craig Beaver: But again, highlighting the school bus

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Craig Beaver: the driver, the kids getting on. Those are the important things. And seeing it, that happens to be an electric bus, although we didn’t say that that’s that is

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Craig Beaver: and then going back to this was the this is a copy of what it cost us

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Craig Beaver: for the bus the ads on the transit buses. So again, this is for a 1-month period they were discounted. It was $11,000. And you can see how many units over here 17 buses for the on the small one on the back, and then 15 the bench ads. These were for the bench ads. You can see what it cost us there. We even put a couple on the shelters.

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Craig Beaver: you know.

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Craig Beaver: So again, it gives you an idea of what kind of costs those are.

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Craig Beaver: And then we also did social media as well. So, we have a. The district has a Facebook page. I’m sure you do, too. And so, they we did some Facebook ads, which were that expensive. So, this is what one of our social media ads was. This is what came up.

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Craig Beaver: So, it was a 5 second pop up

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Craig Beaver: So again, something to think about.

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Craig Beaver: I think it was I. I want to say, I remember $40 being in there, and it might have been like $40 a month type of thing. Because it was on our site, or you know, or it would pop up if you did certain click on certain things. I’m not exactly sure how it worked, but it didn’t just come up on the Beaverton site, but it also came up on other things. So

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Craig Beaver: and okay did that.

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Craig Beaver: Then we have the 12 second pop up.

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Craig Beaver: It’s another way. That was a little bit more expensive. But that was something to do, too.

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Craig Beaver: Okay.

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Craig Beaver: so, talk a little bit about, that’s basically the things that we did so about the only thing we didn’t do was hire an airplane and drag a streamer behind it. But if it would have if it would have hired people, I would have done so, anyway. So that’s some of the interesting ways that we get people in the door. We got a lot of people in the door in.

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Craig Beaver: you know. In 2022, the 2023 school year we hired 70- 72 bus drivers to the seniority list

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Craig Beaver: and then we’ve added between 55 and 65

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Craig Beaver: in 2023-2024, and we’re at

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Craig Beaver: 52. Right now through today we’re at 52 that drivers that we added. You know, we lose about 20 people a year

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Craig Beaver: through retirement and just resignations and things like that.

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Craig Beaver: So, you know we know we must fill 20. And so, we’ve been, you know, building things up, but again, especially in Oregon. Now, you know, and I’m sure it’s in other States, too. There’s a long term. Leave the 12 weeks.

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Craig Beaver: Federal paid leave and things like that. So that really became prevalent in Oregon. And so, you know, we’ve lost a lot of people. You know, we probably have right now. I probably have a dozen drivers that are either extended workers compensation or personal. You know, personal family leave something like that, and those are open routes, and they need to be replaced. So even though we may not lose them, they’re out for 3 months and again with 275 drivers, you know.

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Craig Beaver: You know, we know we’re going to have 27 drivers gone every single day. 10% is absenteeism every single day.

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Craig Beaver: just because of dental appointments and people getting sick and things like that. And then when you add the extended leaves on top of it, you know we’re talking 35 people a day that we must replace. And so, you know, we must have the bodies be able to do that

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Craig Beaver: so as far as the important things after we get them in the door, you know, are the interview and the hiring process, you know, don’t overlook it. I think that some of the critical things that we found are speed right, that people don’t just wallow. Once they apply that, you know, we get back to them, respond to them. We either set them up for a

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Craig Beaver: we either set them up for an interview, or we say thanks, but no thanks. Sorry. We had better qualified applicants available whatever you know, whatever legal ease that you want to use. But again, if we, you know, turn it around within a couple of days.

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Craig Beaver: you know, I’d say 4, 4, or 5 days at the very most, and then we want to make sure that the hiring process and the application process is easily easy to use and is accessible. So again, everything in our district is online now

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Craig Beaver: point and click. And so, make sure, you know, go on there and apply and make sure you type of thing, and make sure it’s easy to use and work with your Hr. Department.

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Craig Beaver: Salary, placement, salary placement is very important.

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Craig Beaver: Once, you know, you go to make an offer

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Craig Beaver: again. Oregon has a wage equity law now, so everybody that you know has 3 years of driving, qualified commercial driving experience essentially gets placed into the same thing. It doesn’t matter if you drove you know, a double, a tractor trailer with triples, or if you drove a

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Craig Beaver: 26-foot delivery van with that weighed, you know, 15,000 pounds. It is what it is. So, your state check with your legal department, your Hr. Department.

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Craig Beaver: but make sure that you get them placed at the right spot, taking all their trying. We try to give them as much credit as possible. Right? We’re not trying to nickel and dime them and get them in on Step one, you know. We want to get them in as high as we can, because we know that you know they’re going to be happy, and if they’re happy they’re going to stay with us

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Craig Beaver: right? So you know you can’t be, you know.

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Craig Beaver: Penny, Penny, wise and pound-foolish type of thing.

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Craig Beaver: And then, lastly, the onboarding process again, that once, you know they’ve gone through them, you know, and you’ve made the decision of higher, and they’ve accepted the employment. You know. They may have to give 2 weeks’ notice. Great right? You get them in, but if they don’t, we want to try and get them in as fast as possible, because chances are they’ve

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Craig Beaver: you know. They’ve got other irons in the fire, and we don’t want to pull out from underneath us. Especially if we’re only giving them 30 HA week.

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Craig Beaver: Somebody pull out from underneath and so give them 40 HA week. It may be 50 cents less an hour, and they’d rather go with that. So we want to get them in, get them in the door and get them going, because once they get in, they start going, they start to feel a vibe. They see what the job is, especially once they get out, and they start driving the bus and training on the bus with a trainer driving it, you know. That’s a unique and fun thing to do. And we have them at that point. Right? So those are all important things to remember about.

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Craig Beaver: And then lastly, kind of moving into the retention part.

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Craig Beaver: you know some of the main keys. How do we keep people in service training? You know?

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Craig Beaver: all states pretty all states. I’m sure they only have a minimum number of hours in service hours. A driver must have a year to maintain their certificate in Oregon it’s average of 8 hours or 40 hours over 5 years. So other places, California. It was 10hours a year. So, you know, we make sure that we get more than that. Because and you know we do it during.

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Craig Beaver: You know, we do it during the midday break, and things like that.

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Craig Beaver: So, you know, anyway, so in service training is important

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Craig Beaver: in in making, it interesting and fun for it. Workplace, culture, career paths effective, you know, career paths, those are important for folks. You know, the culture again. That’s an entirely different presentation, I’m sure. But you know everybody wants to come to work. You know. You want to come to work. You want to have a place that you know is.

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Craig Beaver: it’s, you know, fun to come in, or maybe not haha fun, but at least it’s pleasant to come in those kinds of things. So, it’s important that you maintain that career paths are important, you know. Again, even though

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Craig Beaver: in our case, most of our people just want to be drivers and get their hours. But you know there are some people that want to work their way up. You know, when I was in San Diego. We had people that were. This is there, you know, 1st real job, maybe, and they wanted to work their way up. So, it’s important to have paths, whether that’s in the training department, into the safety department. How do you become a dispatcher? How do I get to be a router of those kinds of things.

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Craig Beaver: So that’s kind of things we’re talking about. Right? And then effective leadership versus management to me. That’s

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Craig Beaver: really that that should probably be at the top of the list. That’s the key

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Craig Beaver: to all of this, to the retention, and even to the hiring. You know you can be a good manager, but you may not be a good leader, right, you know, and what is a good leader, there’s, you know, again, that’s an entirely different thing, you know, but to me it is that you know you’re engaged. You’re involved. You’re talking to people in my case. I like to get out, and I like to get out and drive at least once or twice a month, part of a route at least, just so I can see what’s going on, you know, and see. I can’t tell you how many changes we’ve made.

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Craig Beaver: because I’ve gone out and driven around things as small as you know. Come back and park into the yard. Go to empty the trash, and the nearest trash can is, you know, at the other end of the yard we’ve got 150 buses. It’s a big yard, so we just added trash cans. You can’t. I can’t believe how many people came up to me to thank me because we added more trash cans, and I would never have known that without going out to do it. So

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Craig Beaver: that’s when I’m talking about effective leadership. You’re engaged, you’re involved, and you’re listening to people. So it’s important to be a good manager. But it’s in my opinion more important to be a good leader.

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Craig Beaver: And then feedback and compensation again. We want to listen to folks.

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Craig Beaver: If you have an exit interview process absolutely, want to, you know, go through that, or whether it’s your human resources that does it and get them, you know. Get the get the information back on that.

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Craig Beaver: It’s a good, good way, but we also do listen sessions once a quarter with ourselves and my supervisors, or we’ll just, you know, come in, and whoever wants to come and just listen and answer questions and talk about anything they want to talk about. So again. Another way, we’ve got some great ideas off that, and implemented many, many things based on those conversations.

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Craig Beaver: And again, compensation. And the reason I bring it up here again last is to say that you always must be an advocate for your people. Right? You must be the 1st one in line, the loudest voice in the staff meetings with the deputy superintendents or the superintendent, you know, fighting to, you know, to get your folks to get a good wage for your folks. And again, it’s not all about wages. Right? That’s

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Craig Beaver: you know, people that come to work for just for the money we found study after study finds that that’s not the primary. You know. People leave. This is just about money, but it doesn’t hurt right? It helps. It helps.

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Craig Beaver: One thing we can tell you is that we found if the compensation isn’t there, we’re not going to get the people in the door, or we’re not going to be able to keep them.

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Craig Beaver: And then the last thing I’ll just say is that there’s nothing worse than you know going through all this hiring process that might take, you know, 6 weeks to do it from start to finish, going through a training that might take 8 weeks to go through, and all the money involved training them, and they work for you for 2 months, and then they leave and go to the private contractor, or they leave and go to the transit agency. So if you kind of keep that in the back of your mind, and try and ask yourself, how can I avoid that? What are the things they need to do to avoid that?

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Craig Beaver: I you know I think you get a lot of your answers, and it gives you some ideas. So

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Craig Beaver: with that, Steve, that kind of wraps everything up again. There’s my information. That’s my phone number. You can get to me. That’s my email address.

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Craig Beaver: If you just go to the district website, it’s just the Beaverton dot K 12 or us. And if you go there, there’s you know our department is on there, click on departments transportation, and we’ve probably got a dozen pages on there. You can see all the different things we do and how we kind of present ourselves to the district and others. And

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Craig Beaver: And yeah, with that, Steve, I’ll throw it back to you. And, you know, it looks like we have time for QA. Or comments, or whatever.

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Steve Kessler: Yeah. Thank you, Craig, that that was exceptional information. There’s a lot of moving parts to make sure you’re doing all the right things to keep the quality bus drivers that you need. And I know you covered some things

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Steve Kessler: that some of our districts out there. Maybe they’re in a more rural area. Don’t have those opportunities to put ads on transit buses because they may not be out there, but certainly they have access to the Internet. You can put up signs. You can put up signs around the schools. Somebody asked if you wouldn’t mind showing that banner again. I think it was the fence banner, the big one. If you maybe scroll back and show that.

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Steve Kessler: But one comment that that I have is in your retention efforts. You talked a lot about culture and management. There, there you had it. But back up, I think.

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Steve Kessler: was there. That’s the one somebody wanted to see the fence manner.

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Craig Beaver: There we go!

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Steve Kessler: By the way, your graphics, there are quite a few comments about that are outstanding, and the promotional ideas here, I think, are exceptional.

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Steve Kessler: But I wonder if you brought up culture, and you know, I think that’s a

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Steve Kessler: when you have that proper culture, whether that’s you know how management operates, how you treat the people

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Steve Kessler: in the end. I think culture is a big part of making sure that you’re able to keep the drivers that you brought in, and I was glad to see you talk about culture there. I have one quick question, what percentage of the new bus drivers. Are you required to help them get a commercial license? Is that pretty much? Everyone? Or you find people that with already a CDL that want to drive a bus.

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Craig Beaver: About probably 85% of the folks come in do does not have a commercial license.

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Steve Kessler: Right.

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Craig Beaver: They may have driven a delivery truck, but it was not a GDW. You know, high enough. GDW, so they didn’t.

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Steve Kessler: Right.

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Craig Beaver: So, we get, you know, and we assume even we have folks come in with a commercial license. We start off strict with them to see what they’re doing, and then

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Craig Beaver: in some cases, they don’t have the best of habits, so they don’t kind of meet our standards, and so we’ll just say, hey, look! We’re going to start over again here.

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Steve Kessler: So, somebody comes. You want to, maybe take them on a road test. Kind of see how they do. Perhaps so.

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Craig Beaver: Well, we start off, you know we onboard them and all that. We have our introduction on board, and we start with our visual inspection, our pre-trip inspection, which is detailed. And then, as you know, once that’s done, then, you know, we get them onto the bus. They start driving, and that’s kind of were

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Craig Beaver: that’s what we’ll find out whether this is more of a tutorial or more of a we’re retraining one of the things I did want to mention that I didn’t hit on was that here we, in order to start training here, person has to have the commercial certificate. It’s a commercial permit. A commercial driver’s permit CLP.

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Craig Beaver: and so

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Craig Beaver: so, they’ll, you know, do training for 4 hours a day, and then, if they want, they can also come in, and, you know, ride routes the second 4 h

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Craig Beaver: if they want a lot of people to want to do that. When I was in San Diego. However, we didn’t require you just we came in, and as they were working on their CDL, and they were doing their classroom training. You know we had them, you know, writing routes as an aid type of thing as well. So that’s something else that you can do. You know you get them in. You get them employed. People are earning right away. I wanted to throw that out for folks as an idea, too.

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Steve Kessler: Alright awesome.

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Steve Kessler: One thing I do want to mention to everybody before we wrap this up today is, I’m sure, a lot of you out there. I know we saw quite a few of our our current school customers, but we, since we’ve been talking about recruiting drivers, we do provide entry level driver training is available online, and that is for class B for passenger, for students. So, you can get all the endorsements, too.

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Steve Kessler: I’m going to put a little poll question up here. If you have some interest in hearing how we could help you with entry level driver training, you can answer yes or no here, and we’ll be happy to reach out to you and mention that how we can do that it is fully online. It can be done efficiently. So

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Steve Kessler: we’ve been quite successful. And we are on FMCSA’s registry as a provider, a training provider. So once the coursework has been completed online, we will transmit that automatically to FMCSA. For you. So, I just want to throw that out there.

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Steve Kessler: I don’t see any other questions coming in right now. Craig. So let me just say this.

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Steve Kessler: we very much appreciate your insight and the techniques that you’re using there at Beaverton to keep your fleet full, and congratulations on the electric buses, too. That’s something that I think a lot of school districts are striving to take part in.

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Steve Kessler: And it seems like you’re well underway to making that conversion. So, congratulations on that and congratulations to the transportation director of the year.

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Steve Kessler: So, we do appreciate that. But having said that, Craig,

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Steve Kessler: we’ll thank you. We’re getting a lot of thank you in the chat here, so we appreciate everything you told us, and for those of you that attended. Thank you for enjoying us today, and we hope you join us for another webinar in the future, Craig. Thank you, sir. Have a great rest of the day.

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Craig Beaver: Thank you very much. Bye-bye. Now.

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Steve Kessler: Bye.