UNTIL recently, Sandra Castillo, 37, a laid-off factory worker, had never driven anything larger than a car. But now she was at the wheel of a 30-foot-long school bus. She made a tight right turn from a wide avenue into a narrow side street in Brooklyn as smoothly as a veteran bus driver.
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This Week’s Podcast (mp3)At her side, with a dual brake if needed, sat Christopher Kaminski, an instructor in a program that was training her to seek a new vocation as a bus driver. Three other trainees riding in passenger seats on this early June morning would later have their turns at the wheel.
Once she is qualified, Ms. Castillo said, she will seek a job with a school bus company, and later with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the public buses in New York City. “The M.T.A. pays more,” said Ms. Castillo, a Queens resident who is divorced and has an 11-year-old son.
She and the other trainees were enrolled in Red Hook on the Road, a program that helps low-income or unemployed New York City residents become bus or truck drivers. The program began in 1995 to train residents of the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, and was later expanded to residents of the entire city, said Tracy Anderson, director of program development at Brooklyn Workforce Innovations.
The group, a nonprofit based in Park Slope, operates the program and other job training efforts at no cost to the trainees. The other programs involve woodworking, installation of telecommunications cables and production assistant work for film and television crews.
The four-week, full-time driving program includes two weeks in the classroom learning about subjects ranging from map reading and commercial driving regulations to job interview skills and working with supervisors.
The other two weeks are on the road, and students are divided into groups of four. Each group has its own instructor and school bus or truck, with the trainees taking turns driving the vehicle throughout Brooklyn and parts of Queens. By the end of the two weeks, each trainee has had 20 hours of driving — not to mention many more of observing their fellow trainees.
The day after road practice ends, the students take the state test for a category of commercial driver’s license that permits driving buses and all sizes of trucks except tractor-trailers. The program aims to place graduates who pass the test with companies that operate trucks, school buses, private coaches, charter buses, airport shuttle buses and transit vans for the disabled.
The companies may provide additional testing and training, said Julio Perez, the driving program’s director. Graduates who later seek to move to the M.T.A. are subject to its training and civil-service hiring procedures, he noted.
Over the program’s 12 years, about 1,200 people have graduated, Ms. Anderson said. Last year, she said, 232 enrolled, 220 graduated, 207 passed the licensing test — sometimes after two or more tries — and 195 were placed in jobs with an average initial salary of $13.62 an hour, or nearly $550 for a 40-hour week.
More than 90 percent of the graduates who were placed in driving jobs in 2005 are still in such jobs, she said.
About half the applicants interviewed for the program are accepted for the 20 or so spots in each of the dozen training cycles offered each year, Mr. Perez said, and over a given year men outnumber women by two to one.
After Ms. Castillo finished her turn at the wheel, Romualdo Martinez, 54, of Queens, took over. He said he had lost his job when the alarm company where he worked for 29 years closed a manufacturing plant and warehouse on Long Island.
Mr. Martinez, who is married and has a young son, said he was nervous only on his first day behind the wheel. “After that I was very comfortable,” he said. Now, after some training, he slowed and glided the bus smoothly between concrete barriers close to both sides of the vehicle where construction work had turned a stretch of street into a narrow single lane.
A third trainee, Marialyn Martinez, 33, of the Bronx (who is not related to Mr. Martinez), said that poor pay was among the reasons she had left her job as an emergency medical technician working for a private ambulance company. The fourth in the group, Luzdary Tintinagoz, 45, of Brooklyn, had given up driving for a car service because of the long hours.
Both women have young children, and mentioned this as one reason for wanting to become school bus drivers. As Ms. Martinez said: “The hours will be like my kids’ hours at school, so we’ll be able to spend more time together.”
Eligibility requirements for the driving program are available at www.rhor.org and (718) 237-4846.
*******WRITTEN BY: Joseph P Fried for NY TIMES*******
