“This bus company does not care about the safety of these children as much as we bus drivers do,” Alice Smith told the Mat-Su school board at a packed meeting. Contract negotiations will resume tomorrow.
School bus drivers pack the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District School Board meeting on Wednesday.
The ongoing strike means no bus service to nearly all Mat-Su schools. The district has kept schools open, and families must figure out how to get their children to and from class. It has sent some parents scrambling to find last-minute transportation. Absenteeism rose by 4% on Wednesday, the Anchorage Daily NewsThe union and Durham’s parent company, Illinois-based National Express, have blamed each other for the breakdown in contract negotiations.
Buses were fitted with arc-style rather than square windshield wipers, drivers said, which left blind spots to the right, and had faulty internal heaters. Durham officials have said new heaters are on order, but haven’t yet been delivered. Bus driver Deb Tilton said she spent two weeks switching through four buses a day, a major disruption to routine for the special-education students she transports, before dispatchers finally got her an assigned vehicle. She also said she had driven buses with wheelchair-lift alarms that continued to sound after a lift cycle and couldn’t be silenced, which she said Durham officials claimed would cost $50,000 to fix.
More than two hours later during the meeting, Trani briefly addressed the strike during a timeline of how Durham was awarded its contract, dating back to an October 2020 request for proposal.
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