Courtesy of Andrea Tinker, Alabama Reflector
The Alabama House of Representatives passed a bill in late January that would allow retirees to work full-time as bus drivers if certain stipulations are met.
HB 138, sponsored by Kenneth Paschal, R-Pelham, would allow state retirees to return to work as full time bus drivers while continuing to receive retirement benefits.
“It’s a bill to address the bus drivers’ shortage that we have throughout the state of Alabama,” Paschal said on the House Floor. “It has a sunset of 2030. That’ll give us an opportunity to come back to assessment and reevaluation.”
Under the bill, anyone who is retired under the Employees’ Retirement System or the Teachers’ Retirement System will be allowed to return to work with employers who participate in either system while still maintaining their retirement benefits if they have drawn retirement benefits for 12 consecutive months and if compensation doesn’t exceed $30,000.
Ryan Hollingsworth, executive director of School Superintendents of Alabama (SSA), said in an interview Monday that the bus driver shortage has been an issue for several years.
“I’ve been in Montgomery now eight years in this role, and the bus driver shortage has been there for almost the entire time,” he said. “So if they are yelling a little louder, ‘Hey, we really need bus drivers.’ I just hear ‘bus driver shortage,’ and that’s been consistent.”
The bill passed the House 103-0.
“Bus driver shortage is a critical issue all across the state, transportation is a big issue, and this is a great solution for that,” House Ways and Means Education Chairman Danny Garrett, R-Trussville, said to Paschal during debate on Thursday
Paschal said the bill originated from one of his constituents who is a retiree and part time bus driver who wanted to do the job full-time but was unable to because of the law.
Hollingsworth said there is a substitute bus driver shortage as well.
“I was in Marion County, and we would have, maybe, in a community where you had elementary and high school and you ran the buses for those two schools. So that in that community, we may only have one substitute bus driver, and so if you had a couple of drivers, especially during the flu season or whatnot, if you had a couple of drivers that had to miss then, then we don’t even have enough bus drivers to cover all the routes,” he said.
Some school systems will hire what they call a “permanent substitute driver,” or a bus driver who is hired on by the school system full-time to drive for multiple school routes.
Nationally, the bus driver shortage has gotten better, but only marginally. According to a recent study from the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank, the number of bus drivers increased by roughly 2,300 (1.1 percent) from 2024 to 2025, it’s still down 9.5 percent from 2019.
Hollingsworth said this bill could help with both shortages.
“I think Rep. Paschal heard his communities that he represents, that’s been an issue that we’ve been talking about, he always comes to our district legislative meetings. We have one a year in district five that he’s located, and he responded to that,” Hollingsworth said.
The bill moves to the Senate. If passed, the bill would go into effect Oct. 1.
For more articles from the state house, visit https://alabamareflector.com.
