KSHB 41 reporter Tod Palmer covers sports business and eastern Jackson County. Share your story idea with Tod.
Steve Gant didn’t have the luxury of riding a school bus to Paseo Academy when he was a child.
“No, we walked,” he said with a hearty laugh. “We walked miles. And we didn't have the days off that they have now, and things of that nature. They’ve got it a whole lot better than we did. Snow days, rainy days — we walked, and I mean long ways.”
Gant spent years driving heavy equipment for the cities of Kansas City and Raytown, but he’s pivoting to driving a bus for his second career in retirement. He hopped behind the wheel of a Lee’s Summit R-7 School District bus Wednesday for a unique job fair in the East Trails Middle School parking lot.
“This is the first time I've driven a school bus, but with Kansas City for 38 years and Raytown for five years I've driven large equipment — loaders and large salt trucks, tandem trucks — so I'm pretty familiar with large vehicles,” Gant said.
Wanting to stay busy, and make a few extra bucks with insurance and other perks the district offers bus drivers, in retirement, Gant’s been attracted to the idea of driving a school bus.
“It's been a couple of years since I've retired now and it just so happened, I was just laying in the bed last night when the news came on and there it was — Lee’s Summit was hiring for bus drivers, so I thought I'd just come out here and just see what it all entails, and just see if it was for me,” Gant, who started paperwork to start with the district after his test drive, said.
Minja Kamatovic, who plans to retire soon, also took the opportunity Wednesday to drive a school bus for the first time.
“I don't want a full-time job,” Kamatovic said. “But it works out with my Social Security and doesn't affect my Social Security benefit. I think it would be fulfilling, doing something worthwhile. And for us old folks, I think we need to be around kids to feel alive.”
Gant said the chance to work with children and help them get back and forth to school was a big part of the appeal for him as well.
“Just being around and helping with the kids, I've always heard that they needed bus drivers and things like that there, so I just thought maybe if I go back to work, that's what I do,” he said. “I'll be able to help out in that way.”
Rob Kamatovic, Minja’s husband, is the Lee’s Summit R-7 transportation safety and compliance supervisor and a former bus driver. He said the district has around 200 bus drivers but always needs more.
“This is a necessity,” Rob Kamatovic said. “At the end of the day, we always need to be recruiting. You always want to have people at your disposal ready to come in.”
Lee’s Summit is hiring a handful of route drivers, trip drivers and bus aides for the remainder of the school year and getting a jumpstart on hiring for 2025-26. Experience can be helpful, but it’s not necessary.
“We take people that have never driven anything bigger than a car,” Rob Kamatovic said. “In three weeks, they're ready to roll, and they're out there driving bus routes.”
He credited a full-time, seasoned training staff for the district’s success developing new bus drivers, but the test-drive job fair concept was new for the Lee’s Summit R-7 School District.
“We've done them where we went out to public facilities and set up a little table, that type of thing, but this is the first time that we're actually getting them in to give it a test drive or give it a spin and let them feel it, so that they understand what they're going to be getting into,” Rob Kamatovic said.
The test drives could become a staple of the district’s quarterly bus-driver recruiting efforts, which will ramp up again in July and next fall after school gets started but before winter arrives.
Bus drivers who stay with the district for at least five years become vested in the retirement program. They also receive medical and dental benefits as well as paid time off.
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