When you need to hire a driver-trainer in your district or company, who do you turn to? If it’s based solely on who’s been on your team the longest or who is liked the most, you could be making a key mistake.

Neither experience nor personality makes someone qualified to take on an instructing role. And that misstep of promoting the wrong person is something Bret Brooks sees often.

Brooks is the founder of Gray Ram Tactical, a training and consulting company for the school transportation industry. He sat down with us to talk about how to avoid those mistakes and how to identify a great driver with potential to train others.

“Just because we have an empty seat doesn't mean we need to put anybody in it,” Brooks said. “We gotta put the right people in it.”

6 Keys to Building Strong School Bus Driver Trainers

1. Start With Someone Who Wants to Teach

The person selected as your new trainer should want to do it. If you hire within, never force someone into something they’re not willing or able to take on.

“What we have to do is put that person that wants to do it in a role where they can assist the current trainers, give them a little bit of opportunity to get in front of people under some supervision and see how well it's received,” Brooks said.

Pro tip: Look for that one person who seems to be already taking on that role informally, the one who others just seem to go to for help. A person who’s got some years of experience plus the personality that draws others in and coaches effectively has the right base to build on.

2. Know Your State’s Trainer Requirements

Because there is no national standard for school bus driver trainers, each state determines how to certify the trainers. Know what this is where you live, whether someone simply needs to be identified or if they must have a certain number of years of experience or hours taught.

3. Look for Teaching Skills, Not Just Driving Skills

Know who can effectively teach with a strong grasp of adult learning theories and the right people skills. That means that a phenomenal elementary teacher may struggle to connect with how an adult learns versus a child.

The selection process of who you pick for the trainer role is critical to success, Brooks reminds.

4. Make Professional Development Ongoing

Make sure that person keeps up with professional development, training, and certifications — especially if they’re transportation students with disabilities or using special needs equipment.

Training is never one and done.

5. Make Documentation Part of the Job

A good trainer also needs to have good documentation habits. Paperwork may be the least favorite part of the job for someone who’s in it for the people, but it’s imperative for legal and compliance reasons.

Recordkeeping and maintaining sign-in sheets is just as much a part of the job as demonstrating a good pre-trip for a new driver.

After all, “We all know if you didn't write it down, it didn't happen,” Brooks said.

6. Create Spaces for Trainers to Learn From Each Other

Unlike directors, there is no national association or conference for school bus driver instructors. Brooks thinks it’s time that changed and hopes to see a day where there is a community for trainers to connect with each other and learn together — much more than a track at an existing conference or something just on a local level.

Aside from the natural information sharing it would allow, it would move the role from an assigned duty to one that is professional and distinguished in and of itself, he said. And that kind of forum makes for better trainers across the country and beyond. 

How to Build and Evaluate Your Training Program

If Brooks could build his own train-the-trainer program (aside from Gray Ram’s existing one-day course), he’d start with a 40-hour class over four or five days that covers your states’ legal requirements and specifications, adult learning principles, and testing to ensure a strong grasp of the material.

Now just as much as a trainer needs to maintain their knowledge with evolving industry standards, is that directors need to maintain metrics on the effectiveness of the training program.

Brooks recommends asking drivers to evaluate the training at the end of a program to offer a score and/or feedback on how relevant and engaging the instruction was. To take it a step further, consider inviting other districts in for an outside perspective.

“If I'm in district A and my trainers are really good, and I do my evaluations and everybody's giving them a good thumbs up, I may have blinders on,” he said. “When I reach over to district B and say, ‘could you have your trainer come over and just evaluate my trainer unofficially, give us some feedback on what you think.’ That goes a long way and it really does pay dividends.”

Strong Training Leads to Strong Drivers and High Retention

Brooks says one thing differentiates teams that have a shortage of drivers versus ones that have a full pool or even a waiting list. And that is that they take care of their people, meaning they invest in them and don’t do the bare minimum.

“It's not always about money,” he said. “One of the ways we take care of people is we give them the information that they need.”

He challenges districts to go above the minimum required training in your state to show that you care about someone and their success. “

To get a baseline of where you’re at right now, do an anonymous survey to get a wide swath of feedback on where you excel and where you have room to improve. Ideally, this includes not just your current drivers, but other district administrators, parents, students, and teachers, to see all the perspectives you may be missing.

“When we look at driver training, don't look at it as a requirement or a box to check,” Brooks advised. “What we have to do is have the mindset that the training that we're providing is part of a larger system to safely transport students.”

When you do that, you’ve got a darn good formula to having happy, safe drivers who are confident in what we’re here to do: serve students and drive them to a promising future.