America's bus-driver 'shortage' isn't new: It's due to years of underfunding, and it's putting kids at risk.

• The current school year brought national stories about bus-driver "shortages."
• But as economists would argue: When employers raise wages, industry shortages disappear.
• After years of underfunding education and school transportation, that's what states need to do.
• This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author. Dr. Stephen Owens is a senior policy analyst at the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute.

The beginning of the current school year brought several national stories of purported school-bus driver shortages. Economists generally take issue with this verbiage because when employers raise wages, industry shortages disappear.

School-bus drivers and monitors have long operated for low pay in difficult working conditions - transporting minors with whom they may not have a relationship during strange hours that make it difficult to take on additional part-time jobs. School districts were mostly able to achieve full employment with these conditions before the pandemic, but the problem has been evident for years and longtime concerns are now coming to fruition.

It is incumbent on school districts to raise wages, and for this to happen, states need to increase school funding.

At the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, where I work as a senior policy analyst, we wrote about the coming crisis well before the pandemic. As in states across the country, the state of Georgia holds the constitutional responsibility to pay for public education. Although in practice, Georgia shares the cost burden with local property taxes and federal funding, the onus sits in the state capital, which helps explain why 53 cents of every dollar spent in public education comes from the state.

As a policy analyst at a non-profit, non-partisan budget and policy analysis organization, I've watched state funding stagnate for more than two decades. To wit: Georgia paid $139 million for pupil transportation in Fiscal Year (FY) 2002, $4 million more than the amount allotted for the program in the current year (FY 2022). While state money languished, the public-school system gained 250,000 students and prices increased for fuel, vehicles, and labor.

To add insult to injury: In the wake of the Great Recession, state lawmakers pushed the burden of paying for bus-driver health insurance to local school districts, a change that was never rectified in the years of economic expansion that followed.

Budgets for school districts can only be stretched so far, and the last two decades have seen additional budget cuts to public education in Georgia every year, save two. Wages, benefits and working conditions suffered as a result.

The added pressure of issues such as mask enforcement for 70 children on each bus (or safety concerns if students are not required to wear them), on top of a typical schedule of two three-hour shifts broken up by four hours of "time off," makes for a difficult sell to many potential employees.

But the damage of underfunding school transportation goes beyond the staff - children's safety is increasingly at risk. The waning state investment has created a situation where as recently as 2018, one out of every four buses in service was at least 15 years old. That same year, 39 school buses on a daily route in Georgia were 30 years or older, meaning as many as 2,600 students rode to school each day on a bus that was made before the first website was created.

Older buses lack the safety upgrades that newer models have, such as anti-lock brakes or rear motorist alert signs. Since the late 1990s, the federal government has required all new school buses of a certain size to include anti-lock brakes due to their ability to stop in the shortest distance and decrease the likelihood of skidding.

It's reasonable to ask why state support hasn't kept pace with school needs in this area. The fight for school-bus funding has few open enemies other than apathy.

When counter-arguments are presented, they fall in two general categories: whether drivers deserve higher wages and, related to the first, how states should pay for any proposed solutions. As to the former, setting aside the value of safely transporting 30 to 70 children daily, the job vacancies themselves make the case for higher pay.

If supply doesn't meet demand for a necessary task (by law, public schools must offer pupil transportation in Georgia), then costs rise.

Benefits are part of this equation as well. Georgia's bus drivers and monitors are not eligible to join the pension that teachers and school leaders enjoy. These school employees instead have a supplemental pension with a significantly lower benefit - working for 30 years earns a bus monitor a mere $472 per month.

Those who might argue bus drivers shouldn't be on the same pension as teachers should consider both the shortage and the fact that most of Georgia's neighboring states do not segregate school employees into different pensions based on role. The term "segregate" is apt because while the teaching profession is majority white, non-certified employees in maintenance, transportation, and custodial work are more likely to be people of color.

This makes any increase in wages for these positions a potential tool for racial economic justice.

As for how states can pay for all of this, the answer is much simpler. School districts have had to borrow from other educational programs for years to cover transportation costs, and it is beyond time to adequately fund education through increased state investment. Raising state revenue (because, spoiler alert, taxes pay for necessary services) can bolster student transportation programs and alleviate strain on the rest of the school.

The only way our schools can compete for bus drivers or other employees with other industries that might have raised wages to meet the current need, including trucking, is if the principal financer (i.e., states) provides additional funds.

Until then, the shortage will continue - but it's not a shortage of drivers, it's a shortage of adequate state public-education funding.

Dr. Stephen Owens is a senior policy analyst at the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, where he focuses on state policies and research that affect public K-12 education in Georgia. Stephen graduated from the University of Georgia, where he holds a doctorate with a focus on education policy.