The opening of school started with a crisis in the Maryland suburbs. Children in Howard County waited for buses that sometimes arrived an hour late, or did not show up at all.

It looked like a straightforward first-day stumble. But by evening, Howard County had canceled 20 of its bus routes - not for a day, but for the whole week. Its two-term superintendent and its California-based bus contractor were soon under fire. And on Friday, the district's chief operating officer resigned.

"There has to be some accountability" said Ruchir Bakshi, a father of two daughters who lives in Columbia, sharing the frustrations of hundreds of other families. More than 1,000 signed a petition calling for Superintendent Michael Martirano to resign.

This week's fury in Howard County is a chapter in larger saga. Districts have struggled - and often failed - to find enough people to drive their students to school. In many school systems, the problem defies easy solutions, and the consequences have occasionally been dire.

Chicago's public school system, with about half of the drivers it needed, said in July that it would have to limit its service to specific categories of children, including those with disabilities. For some others, it offered fare cards to use public transportation.

Officials in Charlottesville told parents that 12 routes would start the year unserved. And in Louisville, opening-day misfires kept some students from getting home until almost 10 p.m. The city canceled more than a week of school for a logistical reset.

New York City's bus trouble may extend through this month. Drivers serving the nation's largest school system are threatening to strike Tuesday, the first day of classes. Chancellor David C. Banks and Mayor Eric Adams outlined a backup plan that would include Uber and Lyft rides for students with disabilities and migrant children.

While bus driver shortages are generating many of the problems, other difficulties have come up, including those involving contracts with private bus companies. (Some districts own buses and employ drivers directly; others use contractors.) In New York City, the issue is an impasse in labor negotiations between private companies and the union for their drivers.

"This has been an unusually high profile year," said Molly McGee Hewitt, chief executive of the National Association for Pupil Transportation, which represents school districts across the country. There is little recent data on driver shortages, Hewitt said, but she sees the picture as uneven: acute in some places and almost nonexistent in others.

Maryland is a case in point. In the state's largest school system, Montgomery County, bus driver slots are filled this year, with backups ready if needed. But Howard County, a high-performing district of more than 57,000 students nestled between Baltimore and Washington, did not avoid the tumult that led to calls for its leader's resignation this week.

And neighboring Prince George's County, the state's second-largest school system, counts more than 210 vacancies within its pool of 1,200 bus drivers. Another 217 bus routes there are being covered by drivers who run extra routes as the school system continues to recruit more operators, said Raven Hill, a spokeswoman for Prince George's schools.

Erica L. Groshen, economic adviser to Cornell University's ILR School and former commissioner of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, said economists are more likely to think of job shortages as "a wage shortfall," especially for positions that don't require lengthy training. A pay hike may be in order, she said.

Other creative solutions are out there too, she said: searching for applicants in different populations, improving working conditions and benefits, finding other ways to distribute the work among employees.

"I suspect maybe school systems have been underpaying drivers for a very long time and maybe they need to look at that," she said. Perhaps, she added, "the chickens have come home to roost."

Some debated how closely the troubles are tied to driver shortages.

Zum Transportation, the contractor involved in Howard County's issues, is based on the West Coast and is fairly new to yellow-bus transportation, observed Curt Macysyn, executive director of the National School Transportation Association. His trade group represents bus companies.

"The challenges that the district is seeing with Zum may be the manifestation of their newness with respect to the district," he said. "It's kind of easy to paint this across the country as a consistent bus driver shortage problem but, really, everything is localized."

Bus operators were in short supply after the early months of the pandemic, Macysyn said, but now the issues are not widespread. Localized shortages were evident before the pandemic, he added.

Louisville school officials said this past week that they hired a company to redesign bus routes with fewer drivers, more bus runs and a greater spread of start and dismissal times. But that meant longer and less-familiar routes for drivers, and the school district did not build in time for extra stops. Superintendent Marty Pollio called the result a "transportation disaster" for the 96,000-student system and apologized, saying the implementation was poor.

Louisville schools spokesman Mark Hebert said after the chaos on Aug. 9, school was out until Aug. 18 for elementary schools and Aug. 21 for middle and high schools.

Still, Hebert said the system's biggest issue is lack of bus drivers. It needs at least 100 more, he said. Some students are getting home as late as 6:30 or 7 p.m., when the last dismissal is at 4:20 p.m. The superintendent has said it will take major changes to get the system functioning well. One option on the table: cutting back on the number of students eligible for bus transportation.

Schools in Charlottesville are steadily pulling students off wait lists for bus transportation, and they recently raised bus driver pay to about $21.50 an hour, the highest in the area, said Phil Giaramita, spokesman for Albemarle County Public Schools.

The waitlist for would-be bus riders has dropped from close to 1,000 to under 700, he said, and the district expects a couple hundred more students to come off the list in the next two weeks. In the sprawling county of 720 square miles, bus transportation is critical, Giaramita said.

"We're making a lot of progress getting back to where we should be," he said.

In Maryland, Howard County parents vented Thursday night at a school board meeting, some calling for an end to Zum's $27-million contract to drive almost half of the system's students.

Zum CEO Ritu Narayan said in an interview Friday that bus routes were not digitized in advance by the district and that 20 bus drivers did not show up Monday. Zum also inherited a 100-driver deficit from previous contractors, she said. Still, she said, the problems will be short-lived.

"When all of the things are together, I can assure that this community will see such a big difference," she said.

Martirano faced the issue again at Thursday's meeting. He noted the importance of getting students to school when attendance had dropped from the same period last year. "It is not lost on me," he said, "that as we start the year talking about the importance of attendance, that Howard County failed as a school system to provide on-time, reliable transportation to many of our students."