Baltimore County Public Schools is heading into the first day of class Monday short about 50 bus drivers, a gap that has already left some families scrambling to get their kids to school on time. Among them is Gwendolyn Cole, whose grandson attends Harford Hills Elementary School and has special needs — she says bus delays have left him without a ride on some occasions, forcing her to drive him herself.
Cole says she plans to keep doing exactly that if the bus doesn't show up, according to CBS Baltimore, which first reported on the district's staffing gap. The union representing Baltimore County's bus workforce, AFSCME Local 434, represents more than 700 bus drivers and has said the district must ensure driver and attendant pay does not lag behind neighboring school systems. The union has reported that the shortage of qualified drivers remains an ongoing challenge for Baltimore County Public Schools.
A Pay Gap With Neighboring Counties
The union's concern centers on wages. Baltimore County Public Schools sets starting pay for bus drivers at $20.72 an hour and bus attendants at $15.45 an hour, according to the district's own job listings — a rate that was raised from $19.02 an hour in recent adjustments. To help with recruitment, the district also offers a $250 sign-on bonus, a $250 referral bonus, a $150 monthly attendance bonus, and a $1,000 retention bonus, along with free Commercial Driver's License training, sleep apnea testing, and physical exams.
Those incentives still leave Baltimore County trailing its neighbors. Private contractors running routes for Howard County Public Schools are advertising starting wages of $26.00 to $31.50 an hour for the 2026–2027 school year, per a listing from Bowen's Bus Service, which also guarantees drivers a minimum of six hours per school day. In Anne Arundel County, average bus driver pay reaches roughly $28.64 an hour, bolstered by a $4.2 million allocation of federal recovery funds the county government used to fund retention and hiring bonuses of up to $5,000.
New Superintendent Puts Recruitment at the Center
The staffing crunch hits early in Bill Heiser's tenure as Baltimore County's new superintendent. Heiser previously spent three years as Chief Operating Officer for Anne Arundel County Public Schools and eight years as president of Baltimore's Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, earning his undergraduate and master's degrees from Loyola University Maryland, according to Loyola University Maryland.
Heiser says the district is working to make sure bus routes are covered, and Baltimore County Public Schools plans to give families more information at the start of the school year. That commitment echoes the 100-day framework Heiser rolled out upon taking office, which named “Talent Identification” — streamlining recruitment for vacancies like bus drivers and teachers — as one of four key pillars, alongside academic excellence, operational readiness, and community engagement, according to WBAL-TV.
A System Moving Nearly 80,000 Students
The scale of the challenge is significant. Baltimore County Public Schools transports nearly 80,000 students, and its Department of Transportation manages roughly 785 daily bus routes across 11 district facilities and five contractor sites, logging more than 17 million miles a year, according to the district. The district has also begun introducing electric buses into its fleet even as it works to fill driver vacancies.
Baltimore County isn't alone in this squeeze. Prince George's County Public Schools saw roughly 10,000 students left without assigned bus routes on opening day this year because of vacancies and rerouting, per the Greenbelt News Review, with that district leaning on contracted providers and bus tracking apps to manage the fallout. Nationally, 81% of school district leaders identified bus driver shortages as an ongoing issue in survey data from AP-NORC and HopSkipDrive, with 83% saying staff had to divert time from core duties to handle transit logistics, as Hoodline previously reported in coverage of a similar shortage in Michigan.
Safety Concerns Add to the Pressure
The staffing gap arrives just weeks after a Baltimore County school bus mounted a curb and slammed into a building on Harford Road in Parkville, injuring 12 people and sending two adults and two children to hospitals. That crash, which Hoodline covered in a Parkville bus crash report, followed earlier incidents this year involving Baltimore County school buses, including a February collision with a sedan in Essex that hospitalized three minors and a March pepper-spray scare on a bus bound for Vincent Farm Elementary that sent 14 kids to the hospital.
For families like Cole's, the driver shortage compounds those existing worries about reliability and safety on the road. As Baltimore County students return to class Monday, the district says closing the roughly 50-driver gap remains a priority even as it works to reassure parents that routes will be covered.
