Sept. 7, 2021
Welcome to back-to-school season! On day one of the new academic year for many, schools and parents face another challenge: A lack of bus drivers. Hundreds of thousands of Minnesota students are headed back into classrooms — as the pandemic still casts a shadow over elementary and high schools and as some districts are struggling with bus driver shortages. In Minneapolis, the district is offering $3,000 hiring bonuses and telling parents it will pay them to drive their kids to school. For St. Paul schools, a bus contractor dropped 40 routes in the last week, prompting the district to scramble for transportation. Read more on the driver shortage and how schools are coping with it from education reporter Elizabeth Shockman. After a judge rejected the previous language, the Minneapolis City Council drafted additional language for the ballot question on replacing the Minneapolis Police Department. Just ahead of a looming deadline for ballots to go to the printer. a county judge struck down ballot language that aimed to remove and replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a new agency, saying the wording was misleading and unworkable. The City Council convened for an emergency meeting to revise the language this afternoon and submitted the new draft minutes before the deadline. Read the full ballot language and more here. Subscribe to our Minnesota Today podcast to get up-to-date Minnesota news twice daily. — Jiwon Choi, MPR News | 