Last night, our brother and Shop Steward Dylan Serkin delivered a powerful message to the Portland Public Schools Board of Directors. Brother Dylan stressed the realities of what it takes to serve our most vulnerable students. Thank you for your continued support, compassion, and vocal advocacy as a representative of your co-workers and members of our local.

Here is the link to the entire 2026 Board of Education Meeting from PPS. The speech begins at 1:43:30 - https://www.youtube.com/live/9hsBk1mL6_c...

Below is the speech Dylan presented as well as photos of the eveent-

Hello. My name is Dylan Serkin (S E R K I N) and I am a Special Needs School Bus Driver. I have been with PPS for 9 years and I am a shop steward with our union, ATU 757. Thank you for your time and letting me speak today.

I want to start by talking about what our job entails. My department, Student Transportation manages the entire transportation network for Portland Public Schools. My office and my fellow drivers focus on Specialized Transportation and the transport of students with special needs in small buses, vans and sedans to and from school. We drive Pre-K and Early Childhood Special Education students up to students who have graduated high school and are attending the Community Transition Schools. We drive medically fragile students with their nurses and we drive students enrolled in various assistance programs. Our riders live across the city and surrounding areas. They come from all different backgrounds, ethnicities, economic situations, and living conditions. One thing all our students have in common is that they are Federally or State mandated to receive transportation.

My fellow bus drivers have always stepped up in times of need. We drove curriculum, laptops and school supplies to families during the pandemic. We worked closely with amazing food service workers with SEIU, to deliver meals while students couldn't attend school in person. We installed HEPA filters in our buses and cleaned daily after COVID shutdowns to keep kids safe. We drive kids home during ice and snow storms, often staying up until midnight or early in the morning to make sure the last kids get home and our drivers get off the road safely.

Along with my department of drivers, PPS uses two different bus contractors, First Student and Student Transportation of America to transport students in big buses and some Specialized Transportation in small buses. These are for-profit companies that own, operate, and repair their own buses, often paying their drivers more than us with better benefits, starting wages, and even hiring bonuses. After all that, these companies still generate a profit. The Department of Transportation has a 44 million dollar budget.

30 million of that goes to our contractors.

They have the same jobs we do and are qualified to drive these students, but we receive much better training and are more personally and professionally engaged with families and these students' individual needs. Some of our drivers have driven these students through their entire school process. Our PPS Transportation Team just completed at the State-wide Oregon Pupil Transportation Association Bus Safety Exercise Competition and we scored first, second, and fourth in the individual events. Our team scored 2nd in the Special Needs Team Event. We are experts in the field and take our jobs and skills seriously. Each one of our students has highly specific needs and we get to know all our students and families. We work closely with schools, teachers and programs to give these students incredible support.

Our department never seems to receive enough funding to meet the bare minimum asked of us and what is legally mandated for our students. We just signed a Tentative Agreement on a new contract with PPS and voted on its ratification yesterday. Our members voted Yes. It’s the best contract we could hope for with current financial restraints. Given the planned cuts in the future and current shortfalls, we are worried the future does not look good for an already under-resourced department.

We have around 90 bus driver positions and 18 van and sedan drivers. This FTE is limited and we do not receive more even after being asked to add more students to our routes and to our workload. There are currently 80 bus drivers and this shortage makes it almost impossible to cover all our routes. On top of the shortages, drivers still get sick and need time off. Drivers have family emergencies, medical leave and kids of their own to take care of. We had at least two drivers injured on the job this year, 1 by a student on the bus. On a given day we may be short 20-25 drivers. Our office is overwhelmed. We have qualified office staff driving students, radio operators driving buses and being covered by managers and on a few days even our Director and Assistant Director running radio. This leads to their work not getting done. When managers can’t do their jobs, we all suffer. Communication isn’t happening. Minor issues that could have been solved early turn into major problems later on. This year we lost 12 drivers and more will leave soon even with the very small raises we agreed to on the new contract. Our lack of resources and less wages than our contractors starting pay, makes it hard to attract new drivers. When we do hire new drivers, they take weeks of training to get them up to speed. The overwhelming workload and lack of support has caused many drivers to seek new employment or retire.

PPS owns and operates, by my count, 97 buses. Most of our buses are aging or downright old. Many buses have over 150-200k miles and have various levels of maintenance needs. These buses have been bouncing down Portland roads for decades and it shows. We have received 11 new electric buses in the past few years. There are 3 more on the way. We are currently only able to use 2 due to various issues including factory recalls, charger station repairs and training. These buses cannot be repaired by our union mechanics, but get contracted out for work. Even with the eventual addition of these electric buses, we do not have enough buses some days to drive all our students. This means more and more routes are getting sent to our contractors who have their own bus and driver limitations. We have buses from the late 1990s, buses that still have tape players. These are old buses. We have buses that leak water on drivers and students, buses with mold issues, buses covered in duct tape to hold on parts, buses with holes or broken driver seats, and virtually no A/C for kids on hot days. We have buses break down in the field and the driver has to wait with students on board for a new bus to arrive. Most of these older buses can't be repaired or updated due to parts no longer being manufactured for them. There are at least 10 buses that are so broken or damaged that they will never be driven on routes again. We had 22 downed/broken buses on the last day of school. As you can imagine, any mechanical issues these buses have are distractions. This is not great for a bus driver trying to get kids to school or home safely.

These buses are parked at our 2 yards in North Portland. We spend extra money every year just on fuel and wear-and-tear, running routes from this non-centralized location. Both our yards have to be protected by electric fences and one with the addition of daylight security to limit theft and keep drivers safe. One of our yards has no bathroom facilities and drivers must use a Port-a-Potty.

Along with our past funding and resource issues, we had been working without a contract since July of 2025. Our current TA’d contract is a start, but comes drastically short of the cost-of-living increases and the 400-600% increases in insurance premiums we have received since our last contract. Some drivers will get less hours in the upcoming school year. This is huge for people living paycheck to paycheck. Our subcontractor bus companies make profits while our drivers had a furlough day and some qualify for SNAP benefits due to low wages. Why should our drivers suffer from a decades-long broken-budget and money going to the top and not our union drivers who keep our kids in school?

This year I have seen more parents and students with hardships. I've seen more anger and violence on our buses and directed to our drivers from parents. Just last month I had to explain to a mom our department's lack of resources and why her kid didn’t get picked up on time and why she can’t get a hold of anyone on the phone at Transportation. Many of our drivers are having similar conversations with parents. As the face of the District and often the only staff that some parents see every day, we need better answers to give them. We don't want to add to parent struggles by being late to pick up their students while they try to get to work on time.

We work with amazing kids who struggle more than most to get fair and equal treatment. Our lack of resources, lack of drivers and lack of buses has led to shortened school days for many of our riders. Yes, some students are getting shortened days due our delays. We constantly endeavor to get kids to school on time, but sometimes we run 10-15 minutes late, day after day. As the school year progressed and our driver shortages worsened, we had students who don't have drivers assigned at the start of the day. They may arrive 45 minutes to 2 hours late to school. All of these issues have led to less instructional time for students and many of our students won't go to school if we are late. Families with no backup transportation are left hurting. If we are late to school in the afternoon, teachers and staff have to extend their days waiting for our arrival. This community of underserved students already struggles with attendance and school resources. We hate to see our department adding to their struggle. Why should these students get shortened school days just because they ride the special needs bus?

I have amazing skilled and highly-trained coworkers. We have hundreds of hours of training and classes on not just driving the bus, but managing students with special needs, safety equipment and emergency situations along with first aid and CPR training. These drivers are patient, helpful, and work so well with students with different needs and life experiences.

Our students' success is personally rewarding to all of us. We get to know our kids and take their happiness and safety seriously. There is nothing better than a smile or a silly knock-knock joke from a kid on the bus. There is nothing better than a fist bump from a non-verbal kid at the end of a long week or finding a way to calm down a group of overactive kids and get them home safely. We are role models, mentors, counselors, safety experts and friends to these students. There is nothing better than knowing we are a stable adult who shows up every day in a very chaotic world.

We want more drivers at PPS not less. We want more working buses that are safe for our students, not less. We want more in-house work, not outside contracts. We want a fair raise that keeps us working and not taking a loss since our last contract. We want insurance contributions from the District that are the same as other PPS unions.

We’re asking the Board and the community for help. Our Union along with other PPS Unions need your support. We see the District continuing to move budgets deeper and deeper in the red. We see more and more usage of contractors who are only profit driven and not PPS Union workers. We see a decline in student enrollment worsened by failing to meet even the minimum of what our kids and parents expect, and what is mandated. Please reach out to your elected officials and our governor. We want our special needs students to receive equal treatment and equal school days and every opportunity possible. We don't want the District to balance their budget on the backs of the workers who help these students and keep our schools moving forward.

Thanks again for your time.