Audit Finds School Bus Drivers Unlicensed, With Felonies

(Source: MIRS.news, Published 04/11/2025) An audit of school buses found quite a few school bus drivers didn’t meet qualifications and the driver inspections were not done daily, while the annual process of state inspection was taking much longer than a year in some cases.

The Auditor General report looked at 242 of nearly 1,936 bus drivers between Sept. 1, 2020, and June 30, 2023, in 25 school districts and found 168 did not have documentation that the drivers met the qualifications.

They found 123 of the total 1,936 bus drivers didn’t have a valid commercial driver’s license (CDL) or the endorsement required to drive passengers or school buses. Out of those, 99 are indicated to have driven a bus with students.

Ten bus drivers were shown to have violations that would require them to retake a CDL driver's test, and at least eight of the drivers hadn’t retaken the test.

There were 15 bus drivers that had one or more felony convictions at the time of hire or during their employment.

The audit also found that of the 25 school districts they looked at closely, there were 21 that couldn’t document that bus drivers were conducting a pre-trip inspection of the school bus before picking up students.

There were 10 school districts that excluded at least one of the federally required items from their pre-check, which included steering, parking brakes, and service brakes.

“Child safety is a top priority of local school districts and the Michigan Department of Education,” said Bob Wheaton, a spokesperson with MDE.

Wheaton said the department was taking actions to improve how local school districts could train bus drivers and said they had already put out “enhanced training courses” for school bus supervisors and were looking to improve the communication between the local district transportation officials and MDE.

He said MDE was also trying to secure funding for a second staff member to deal with monitoring of school bus transportation across the state.

“The department is taking actions to improve in areas of department responsibility identified by the audit,” Wheaton said.

The audit also found that the Michigan State Police needed to evaluate how often it conducted the yearly school bus inspections and noted that the longer the buses weren’t inspected, the greater the chance for them to have reportable problems or problems that would take them out of service.

The audit showed MSP conducted more than 38,000 annual school bus inspections during the audit period and the audit saw three annual inspection cycles.

They found that 58.6 percent of the audits were done on time, and 27.1 percent were over by up to 90 days. There were 10.9 percent that were over by up to 180 days and there were 3.4 percent that were over by up to 365 days.

MSP spokesperson Shanon Banner said the department takes the school bus inspection responsibility very seriously.

“As a result, the MSP has already put into practice several of the Office of Auditor General recommendations,” Banner said.

She said MSP disagreed with what the audit defined as annual. She said the time they went by was a full school year and not a calendar year but said they would conduct an evaluation to see if there was a correlation between maintenance issues and the inspection times.

She said the annual safety inspection are available online and there is a QR code displayed on every school bus door that links to the inspection.

“The MSP will continue to prioritize the safety of Michigan’s students, ensuring parents can be confident in the reliability of their child’s transportation to school every day,” Banner said.