Hinds County School District administrators have been learning the hard way that “contracting out” can be a practice fraught with peril. Their instructor is Teamsters Local 891.

Last week, the administrators were sent scrambling by notice that school bus drivers employed by Ohio-based First Student to serve the district’s 6,685 students would be going out on strike.

How appealing it must have sounded three years ago when school board members were approached by the for-profit student transportation business. “You don’t have to worry about a thing,” we can imagine the salesman saying. The company schedules and staffs the buses and even owns and maintains them. The district’s only role has been to write a check.

Details are not clear — they rarely are in labor-management disputes — but this strike seemed stranger than most. For one thing, the Hinds drivers have the best pay ($10.20 per hour) and benefits of the four districts in the state that also contract with First Student. Drivers in West Point and in Madison and Yazoo districts also work for First Student, but were not told to strike.

“Isolating the children of Hinds County School District appears to be posturing by the Teamsters to financially hurt First Student,” is how Superintendent Stephen Handley characterized the situation.

The Hinds district’s three-year contract with First Student expires in July and negotiations for a four-year contract are reported to be under way. Most districts, including the Vicksburg Warren County School District, manage their own bus systems and few, given the Hinds situation, likely will be shopping for a service provider.

Myriad private firms call on city, county and school system managers all the time. Their services range from record-keeping and payroll administration to ambulance services to debt collection and even archiving court dockets and land records. “One check, no worries” is the pitch they have in common. Often, this works to the benefit of the public — such as online services that allow for renewal of driver’s licenses, payment of taxes and more.

But privatization can also mean a loss of operational control. Ask any Hinds school board member what it feels like to be told the buses were going to be parked and there was nothing they could do about it.