The Ontario School Bus Association (“OSBA”) is a non-profit association that works with provincial and federal governments, school boards, transportation consortia and various transportation sector organizations and advocates for its members on various student transportation industry issues. The Request for Proposals (“RFP”) is being issued by OSBA for the purpose of obtaining Proposals, as defined in the RFP, from qualified contractors for the provision of third party project coordination services for the School Bus Driver Retention Pilot Project (the “DRP”).
Every school day in Ontario, over 825,000 children are safely and reliably transported to and from school in approximately 20,000 school buses and school purpose vehicles by professional school bus drivers. This means Ontario’s student transportation industry safely transports in excess of 42.5% of the two million elementary and secondary school students enrolled in Ontario’s educational institutions. Ontario is currently being impacted by a systemic driver shortage which is increasing transportation times for students. The risk of route cancellations or delays will remain if the system continues to experience driver recruitment and retention issues. It is recognized that transportation service interruptions due to driver shortages impact students and impose a burden on parents. One of the factors than can affect school bus driver shortages is low recruitment and retention rates.
The DRP is a pilot project being funded by the Province of Ontario as represented by the Minister of Education (the “Province of Ontario”) to enhance school bus driver retention rates in Ontario. A series of three “retention bonus” payments will be made directly to eligible school bus drivers for the purpose of enhancing recruitment and retention rates by providing a financial incentive for drivers to stay on the job throughout the school year. OSBA has entered an agreement with the Province of Ontario (the “Transfer Payment Agreement”), pursuant to which OSBA is responsible for carrying out the DRP over the 2017-2018 and 2018-19 school years and assessing the effectiveness of the DRP in improving school bus driver recruitment and retention rates.
The Successful Bidder, as defined in the RFP, will be responsible for employing/contracting with and assigning a coordinator for the DRP (the “Project Coordinator”) that will oversee all strategic and tactical, day-to-day responsibilities, evaluation, coordination and implementation of the DRP as more fully described in Schedule A to the RFP. The Project Coordinator assigned to the DRP by the Successful Bidder, must meet the qualifications set out in Schedule A to the RFP. Preference is for a single Project Coordinator to be assigned full time to the DRP from March 2018 to January 2020 and available from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm, Monday to Friday, excluding holidays.
