Put Tony Harris behind a big steering wheel, and you’ve got a happy man.
That, he did for 20 years as a school bus driver in Preston County.
Harris navigated roads where the pavement appeared to disappear, once one finally crested the top, with lanes barely wide enough for a subcompact.
Potholes, swoops, switchbacks — and January — abounded.
“Hey, I liked driving a school bus in the snow,” he said with a chuckle. “I lived for it.”
So did a lot of other men and women — until the Marcellus shale crews came in and those transporters of children found out their Commercial Driver’s Licenses could be steered to bigger paydays if they went with the new deal in town.
These days, Harris, who is now director of transportation for Monongalia County’s school district, lives for the recruiting and hiring of drivers for his buses.
The local district has 111 routes to cover, which Harris and his colleagues are managing for now.
However, the enterprise these days, he said, is about as tenuous as a high-wire act in a heavy wind.
“We’re filling the routes,” he said Monday, as the district was embarking on its second week of the academic year.
“But we’re going with substitutes,” he said.
“There’s not a lot of room with anybody who wants to call off.”
In past years, the district had as many of 130 drivers in the system, checked out and ready to go.
Drivers earn around $138 a day for a six-hour shift. The department’s website is https://sites.google.com/boe.mono.k12.wv.us/mcstransportationdepartment/home for those requesting phone numbers and more information.
Harris wants to hold a recruiting fair before the end of September, he said.
Given the diversity of Mon’s asphalt ribbons (and dirt roads) the job, the transportation director said, is challenging.
There are the urban rush-hour circumstances of Morgantown proper, Suncrest and W.Va. 705, he said.
Mon County’s western end and other spots where the unincorporated towns lay, he said, present their own rural particulars for negotiating the road.
The rewards come, though, he said, if you like to drive — while enjoying open-ended days and the families you meet on the route.
“By the time I retired, I was hauling the kids of the kids who were with me when I first started out,” he remembered.
“That was always the best part of the job for me.”
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