Sticking Together


By Angela Coakley
First Student driver
Charleston, South Carolina

Coakley.jpgMy name is Angela Coakley. I am a driver with First Student at the Mt. Pleasant yard. I have worked for First Student for six years.

My day starts at 6:30 am, when it’s still dark outside, and sometimes very cold. I have several runs throughout the day. I transport children who attend a school for the arts in the morning. They are a group of middle and high school students. Later in the day, I transport four-year-olds. The kids are great, but traveling for two hours with four-year-old kids can be a handful. And I don’t get back to the yard until 4:30 pm.

“I’m glad to see a national movement of school bus workers. It means people are seeing how important it is to have a union in our industry. As long as we stick together and fight for what we want, we can do anything.”

One challenge I face in my job is driving 75 children around while concentrating on the road. Sometimes I will have to pull over to deal with children misbehaving. There are so many different personalities that you have to treat each individually and know how to deal with them.

We, as drivers, have a lot of peoples’ lives in our hands. We have to be safe and cautious because we carry a precious cargo that cannot be replaced.

I enjoy my job, but there is a lot of room for improvement at my job. We need better pay. We need respect for the professional jobs that we do. We need to see an end to the favoritism. We need health insurance. What First Student offers is a supplemental plan, which covers very little. I am a single parent of four and I do not have health insurance. It would cost me $258 a week to cover my family under First Student’s plan. I cannot afford that. When I go to the doctor, I am forced to pay out of pocket.

When we recently found out we won our union vote, it was an awesome feeling. It felt like the pressures just slipped away. Some people cried because they were so overwhelmed, knowing that we were finally being heard; others danced and celebrated.

I’m glad to see a national movement of school bus workers. It means people are seeing how important it is to have a union in our industry. As long as we stick together and fight for what we want, we can do anything. I look forward to more school bus workers joining us as Teamsters.