More than a month into the school year, Waterbury students are still climbing aboard buses that are not theirs, and district leaders say that mix-up, combined with a stubborn driver shortage, is behind a wave of late pickups, overloaded routes, and missed stops across the city. Some buses are hitting their 71-passenger capacity before they even finish their scheduled stops, because students keep boarding whichever bus their friends are riding instead of their own assigned route.
Wrong Buses, Full Routes, and a District Scrambling to Respond
The pattern came into focus at a Board of Education workshop held on October 1, where district leaders laid out just how tangled the situation has become, according to CTPost. Waterbury oversees bus service for every student in the city, including those attending district, charter, private, and Catholic schools, which means the ripple effects of any shortage spread wide. Edwin Ellington said students cannot simply be turned away when they board a bus going to school at the wrong stop, a policy reality that leaves drivers with few options in the moment.
That has forced the district to lean on its drivers to manage the chaos route by route. Officials asked bus drivers to keep rosters tracking which students are and are not assigned to their routes, and drivers are expected to notify Durham School Services immediately when a replacement bus is needed. Drivers have also been told to tell students waiting at a stop that another bus is on the way, and to communicate with the central office and school administrators whenever a bus becomes overloaded. Under district policy, drivers are required to request another vehicle outright when students at later stops cannot board at all.
Skepticism From the Union and a Push for Real-Time Updates
Not everyone is convinced the new protocols will work. Terrence Lott Jr. remained skeptical that bus drivers could realistically ensure students board only their assigned buses, and he said identifying individual students by ID would be a genuine challenge for drivers or aides already managing a packed vehicle full of kids. District leaders are hoping technology can fill some of the gap: school administrators can provide families with real-time information about their students' buses, and Darren Schwartz said the district will work through the communication protocol with each school's administrators. Schwartz said he hoped the driver shortage itself would prove temporary.
The disruptions have followed a familiar pattern for Waterbury families in recent weeks. Fox 61 reported that parents said the problems were continuing into a third week, with children variously picked up late, not picked up at all, or dropped off at the wrong stop altogether, according to fox61.com. Durham School Services and parent company National Express attributed some of the trouble to a glitch in their routing software and apologized for the inconvenience, the outlet reported.
The Staffing Math Behind the Delays
Underneath the software glitch sits a more familiar problem: not enough drivers. Durham School Services currently has 118 drivers operating a fleet of 150 buses, and the pipeline of new hires is still filling in. The company has 33 drivers in the pipeline and 18 currently in training, and Rebecca Gonzalez expected five to seven of them to be road-ready by mid-October. In the meantime, the shortage has caused some students to arrive late to school in the morning, and it has pushed back buses serving sports and other after-school activities as well.
Waterbury Public Schools has separately said it has 119 bus drivers covering all 107 bus routes, a figure reported earlier this fall by fox61.com. All-Star Transportation, another provider serving the region, described an even sharper gap: general manager Stephen Gardner said the company was down close to 15 to 20 percent of its drivers, calling it among the worst shortages the company has experienced, according to wtnh.com. New Waterbury-area drivers at All-Star start at $18.75 an hour, and the company has launched an aggressive social-media recruiting campaign alongside in-person hiring events around Connecticut, per the same report.
One School's Workaround and a Wider Pattern Across the Industry
At Crosby High School, the mismatch played out in a concrete way: students were unable to board a popular route because the seats were already filled with classmates who were not assigned to that bus. In response, Crosby's school administration communicated directly with students and families about sticking to their correct bus assignments.
The pressures playing out in Waterbury echo a broader national trend. School-bus-driver employment nationally remained 9.5 percent below 2019 levels as of August 2025, even as inflation-adjusted hourly wages rose 4.2 percent year over year, according to foxbusiness.com. The outlet noted that split shifts make the job less appealing than work with steadier hours or better pay, while the expiration of federal pandemic-relief funding has added pressure on districts trying to maintain service on tighter budgets. A shortage of drivers, the report found, tends to translate into late pickups, longer rides, and consolidated routes — all problems Waterbury families are now living through.
Other districts have tackled similar shortages by opening their wallets. In New York, East Greenbush Central School District was short nearly 14 bus runs when Superintendent Kurtis Kotes took over in July 2025 and had to consolidate runs, causing some students to arrive late and cutting into instructional time, per the Fox Business report. A recruitment push there yielded roughly five to eight new hires, helped along by pay of about $28 an hour and health benefits — notably higher than the starting wage offered to new drivers in Waterbury.
What Waterbury Families Can Do in the Meantime
Waterbury Public Schools says its Transportation Department is responsible for monitoring service and working with its providers to ensure transportation is safe, reliable, and equitable, and that it is also responsible for ensuring providers maintain qualified drivers and appropriate staffing, according to the Waterbury School District. The district says it uses data and technology to look for ways to improve routing and service going forward.
For families dealing with day-to-day issues, the district recommends first contacting the bus company manager and then the WPS Transportation Department if problems persist, per its own guidance. Families can also track Durham School Services buses through the Durham Bus Tracker mobile app, and students are advised to be at their stop ten minutes before the scheduled pickup time. District policy also makes clear that drivers are prohibited from letting a student off at a stop other than their scheduled one, unless they have written permission from the school or the Board of Education Transportation Department.
