Article from For Liberty by Norm Leahy.

Fairfax County, Virginia runs the state’s largest public school system. Students have begun the fall semester as they finished the spring: online. One might expect that the school buses used to transport students would be idled because of this.

Not so. The district is running some buses on ghost routes, or having them deliver meals and supplies to avoid laying off drivers and attendants:

In some places, drivers have been tasked with delivering school meals to families. In others, they are distributing technology and devices. Fairfax County Public Schools in Northern Virginia, however, has another solution — send bus drivers out to drive their old routes in empty buses, picking up no one and delivering nothing, to justify their continuation on the payroll.

Starting Monday, “all drivers and attendant[s] will be required to run their routes twice a week to sharpen your driving skills,” reads an email Wednesday from an administrator to a team of drivers at a Fairfax County high school. “If you are unable to perform this task . . . you must put in for leave.”

The email, obtained by The Washington Post, says this kind of route-running will continue “until we go back to school.”

Not wanting to lay off workers is one thing. Having them run empty buses merely to “sharpen” their driving skills is a waste of their time and the taxpayers’ money.

Image Credit: By Jericho [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons