
VIDEO: Daimler Shares Tips on Reducing Costs in School Bus Fleets
Learn how St. Charles (La.) Parish Public Schools works with Daimler Truck Financial and its local Thomas Built Buses dealer on a lease-purchase plan for fleet replacement.
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We often focus on school buses and the drivers and transportation personnel who make them run, but technicians don’t come up as often as perhaps they should in our coverage. Without our maintenance experts, we would have no buses to transport students.
And keeping a sufficient number of them is apparently growing more challenging. An update to a recent report from nonprofit TechForce Foundation in 2018 has found that an increasing demand for professional automotive technicians is dovetailing with a declining supply of new technicians entering the industry. This is happening despite the industry’s efforts to tackle the issue and a small bump in new post-secondary degrees and certificates available for future diesel technicians.
Exacerbating the shortage is not only a need for more new technicians, but for those who are well-versed in new technologies, such as the type involved in maintaining electric school buses. In our story on a planned electric school bus training program, Tim Shannon, director of transportation for Twin Rivers Unified School District (USD) in McClellan Park, California, notes that the lack of familiarity with electric bus maintenance, as that vehicle option becomes more popular, could cause the shortage to grow even more dire.
Learn how St. Charles (La.) Parish Public Schools works with Daimler Truck Financial and its local Thomas Built Buses dealer on a lease-purchase plan for fleet replacement.
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