This story was updated at 11:54 a.m. on Tuesday, March 26 with comments from Missouri Central School Bus Regional Operations Manager Scott Allen.
Missouri Central School Bus Co., which transports thousands of St. Louis Public School District students to and from school, has terminated its contract with the district and is permanently closing two of its facilities in St. Louis.
School district officials said the contract was supposed to run until June 2025, but the bus company is exercising a clause to terminate the contract at the end of the current school year.
“It is our hope to provide a stable and equitable work environment for the drivers currently working for Missouri Central,” SLPS spokesman George Sells said in an emailed statement. “We want them to continue to transport our students.”
Scott Allen, the Regional Operations Manager at Missouri Central School Bus, said Tuesday that a driver shortage — which is part of a national crisis — makes it economically unviable to honor the agreement. The school district said the bus company threatened to pull out of the contract in December after demanding an additional $2 million for its services. The company, however, had not met performance goals on staffing and delivering students to school on time for three straight semesters, SLPS officials said.
SLPS said it has been negotiating in good faith with Missouri Central since December to find a way to meet the company’s needs while responsibly managing the taxpayer dollars that are allocated for transportation.
In a letter addressed to St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones and the Missouri Office of Workforce Development’s Benefit Program senior specialist Allan Hedrick on Monday, Missouri Central said it first informed the school district of plans to terminate the contract in December.
Allen said in a statement Tuesday that despite good faith efforts by both sides, they were “unable to negotiate mutually agreeable terms” to continue the contract. He said in accordance with the terms of the current contract, they notified the school district six months in advance that the partnership would end at the end of the 2023- 2024 school year.
More than 300 full-time and part-time employees will be laid off, the company said, as it will permanently close two Missouri Central locations in St. Louis on Spring and Hall streets. The layoffs will impact bus drivers, technicians, office clerks, dispatchers, shop workers, road supervisors and various managers, Missouri Central said.
“The permanent closing is a direct result of the termination of our contract for the St. Louis Public School transportation services,” the company said in Monday's letter.
For two days in late February, nearly 100 bus drivers and mechanics called in sick in protest of alleged racism at the company. Dozens of school bus routes were left uncovered on Feb. 26-27 after a diesel mechanic found a noose near his work station. The incident allegedly occurred after the mechanic had a disagreement with his supervisor about fixing bus brakes — some workers said they’re often instructed to Band-Aid over glaring mechanical issues.
Missouri Central said it hired a third-party investigator to probe the matter, but the company has provided no updates so far. The St. Louis chapter of the NAACP said it is also investigating.
The school district said Missouri Central on March 20 cited the controversy in February as something that provided irreparable harm to its reputation, saying that it could no longer work with SLPS. Five days later, the company told the school district that it had made the decision to notify bus drivers of its plan to terminate the contract, Sells said.
“We [were] given no notice that they are making this public announcement today,” Sells said Monday in a statement.
SLPS said the bus company agreed to provide services for the school district through the Camp SLPS summer school period, which ends July 12. District officials say they are now searching for new vendors.
Allen said Tuesday the bus company plans to help the district make a smooth transition into the fall.
"It has been our privilege to serve SLPS students, parents and administrators," Allen said. "We also want to express our sincere gratitude to the MCSB team in St. Louis as we will be looking at all opportunities for our employees to remain with the company."
Missouri Central School Bus is one of eight bus companies owned by North American School Bus, which is headquartered in Joliet, Illinois.
