GUILFORD COUNTY, N.C. — Guilford County Schools (GCS) says the district has received and denied all 146 leave requests from bus drivers who are planning a walkout for pay raises on Monday and Tuesday of next week.
"Nobody has reached out to us to let us know other than submitting leave request forms that there is any kind of plan to not have bus drivers in place," Chief Financial Officer Angie Henry continued. "So that’s the only way we knew, we still haven’t been contacted by anyone in an official capacity to let us know what the plans are."
Henry says the district can only deal with the cards they've been dealt.
"I don’t disagree {with the bus drivers} and unfortunately GCS is not a revenue-generating government body," Henry explained.
"We asked the County Commissioners this past budget cycle for a million dollars to increase bus driver pay so we don’t disagree that bus driver pay needs to increase certainly it does but I think there’s an appropriate way for that message to come across," she continued.
Guilford County Board of Commissioners' Chair Alan Branson says the walkout is a misguided effort on a local level. Branson said the best way to go about it, is on a state level. GCS agrees.
"We consistently ask and advocate at the state level that the state create a salary scale for bus drivers that’s reasonable."
So what's the plan?
Guilford County Schools says they are working on a plan, and it's not set in stone yet.
Right now, the district is looking for more drivers who can step in on the 25th and 26th when they lose about 30% of their drivers to the walkout.
"We’re working hard to identify other staff in the district who have their CDL and are eligible to drive buses to make them available so they can drive buses on Monday and then we’ll do that best we can to get kids to school."
Will this be counted as an excused absence for students who rely on a ride and can't make it to school those days?
"We haven't gotten that far yet I'm sure we have a policy on that I just don't know what it is," Henry explained.
When will the district be notifying parents of the plan for this walkout?
"We’ll probably start messaging later this week to let parents know."
Even if you find some staff members with CDL licenses' it still won't cover the void of 150 drivers out, so what will you do?
"We’re going to work on a plan to identify where our highest priority is to assign drivers," Henry said. "It may look like there are some areas or regions where we’re asking parents to drive students, we haven’t come up with that yet but we’ll have a plan in place to identify where we need to place our bus drivers."
Guilford County Schools says the goal is to avoid this walkout altogether. The district says they'll be meeting with bus drivers the rest of this week. Bus drivers WFMY News 2 spoke with say it could last even longer than the planned two days.
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