Parents of students who attend Heather Park elementary school are asking the school board to reinstate courtesy bus service which ended in June.
Heather and Carl Wozney live two kilometres out of the catchment area for Heather Park elementary school, where their son attends classes. Although a half-empty bus delivers their daughter to Kelly Road secondary school, which is three-tenths of a kilometre from Heather Park, because they are beyond the boundary, their son is no longer allowed on that bus and they are forced to drive him to their choice school themselves.
The Wozneys, and several other families in the area who have students at Heather Park, want the school board to follow the precedent set a month ago when trustees agreed to let rural students from Miworth have their courtesy bus service to Heritage elementary restored until the end of the current school year.
"We wrote lots of letters last year when they threatened to end it and we were basically told there's not a hope, so we thought we'd be driving all year, but then when Miworth got it ...," said Heather Wozney.
"[Trustee Roxanne] said [in Tuesday's public board meeting] that was a one-off, but you don't do one-offs. This is a whole district thing and you do for everybody. It's equal access. The bus goes right by them already to pick up the high school kids."
Wozneys' son attended Nukko Lake school from kindergarten to Grade 5 and was bussed to Heather Park last year. They moved their son to Heather Park after Nukko Lake was identified for possible closure due to low student enrolment. As a Grade 8 student he will move on to Kelly Road next year.
There are six families in Wozneys' area with about a dozen Heather Park students and several of those families take turns driving in a carpool. The return-trip distance to drive from the Wozney house to Heather Park is 16 kilometres. The drive to Nukko Lake and back is 30 km. Because the Nukko Lake bus picks up students who live on rural acreages, the actual bus route is longer, meaning Wozneys' son would be spending even more time on a bus, sharing the road with 168 log trucks moving loads daily on Chief Lake Road.
"We're on the roads more, and we're making more congestion in front of the school where they have to plough out the snow," said Carl Wozney. "If the school district is concerned about the carbon footprint, this is a real waste driving kids with our vehicles back and forth when they're running a bus that's less than half full,"
At the Oct. 25 board meeting, trustees advised school administration to extend bus route 17 from Miworth to include a stop at Heritage elementary for the rest of the school year.
Trustee vice-chair Trish Bella said its time for school administration and the school board to take another look at the bussing policy. Bella had requested in October that all courtesy bussing be restored, to avoid parents in similar situations having to make personal pleas to the board to reverse its decision to cut their service.
But district secretary treasurer Bryan Mix says it's not that simple. There would be increased costs as a result.
"There's no question we're in a situation where we can't deliver the type of service people are demanding, not with the present staffing and the present budget," Mix said.
The district is already facing a $575,000 budget shortfall. The school district funding formula for bussing generated $4,195,000 for the current school year, but the actual cost of bussing those 4,000 students is $4,772,000.
"The basis of the formula is historical costs and goes back to the year 2000, when the government froze the transportation formula," Mix said. "The only increase in transportation over those 11 years has been 2.4 per cent, but our transportation contract calls for us to pay a Consumer Price Index adjustment, so we have an inflationary increase of about 1.7 per cent a year.
"Fuel hasn't gotten any cheaper and the need to move kids is greater. People are demanding more and more, and they want a ride to school no matter where they live. That's why we've got these issues."
