Will experience driving a 20ft box van help?

1) Gotcha!
2) I'm not sure.

Hey, but seriously, I think most of that is split-shift work: a bit in the a.m., then a bit in the afternoon, maybe 20 hours a week during the terms, then nothing during summer. Sometimes there'll be a field trip and those can be fun--you might be gone all day. I had a few of those--from the Sierra foothills down to the Bay Area and back. Best one was drive from the foothills to San Francisco, pick up a load of kids there, drive them 35 minutes to their event (a science fair), hang out for six hours (all paid/I drove around) then pick them up and drive them 35 minutes, then deadhead back to the foothills. It came to a 14-hour day. A lot of school bus drivers don't want to do field trips: too much work!

Some of the little buggers can be trouble--fight with/spit on other kids, cut seats, smoke dope on the bus. Made me appreciate truck freight.
But of course some of the kids were nice people on their way to becoming nice adults.

In truth, the money's not really enough to live on and there's no benefits (you're not full-time). Most of the school bus drivers in our county are retirees supplementing their social security. I was there BC I needed a few extra $$ and had the time, but I was "The Young One."

I think school bus driver pay in our area is currently something like $9/hr, which even at 40 hours isn't much after taxes, and at 20 hours is not good at all. School districts have tight budgets, so there's always a lot of downward pressure on driver pay. BOL.

 

There's an element of driving school busses that I neglected to mention:

You're responsible for 20-30-40 little lives.

There's no room for error. No excuse will ever be good enough if you screw up. It's heavy duty.

 

My wife has driven a school bus for 10 years. She gets great benefits but the pay isn't great. Fortunately they work it so she still gets a check during the summer although it's not as much as during the school season.

She's gotten to the point to where she hates it. The kids on her route are horribly behaved and when my wife writes them up, little to nothing is ever done about it.

No way I could ever drive a school bus and put up with a bunch a little jerks.

 

All this has made me wonder: to the OP, have you ever considered trying to get into driving a normal bus, instead of a school bus? IE: Greyhound? The pay would definitely be better then school buses.

Only problem is, you still have to put up with idiots on board.