THUNDER BAY—A new policy requiring high school and senior elementary students to register in advance for bus transportation has confirmed that far fewer seats are needed than what local school boards have planned for.
The consortium that oversees school bus transportation—Student Transportation Services of Thunder Bay—has received registrations from 3100 students for the 2018-2019 school year.
That is only about 66 per cent of the 4,700 high school and Catholic senior elementary students eligible for busing on the basis that they live more than 1.6 kilometres from their school.
Until now, STSTB has contracted for buses on the assumption that all eligible riders who had previously taken the bus at the elementary level would continue to use the service in the more senior grades.
With the realization that on some routes only one-third of seats were regularly occupied, the consortium recently decided to look for efficiencies.
Having the new registration data in hand, STSTB manager Craig Murphy says officials will now spend the next two months re-working bus routes for the coming school year.
"We need to see how many buses we need...based on the number of requests for busing. Hopefully, the net effect is that we'll have some buses left over that we can use in other areas where we can use some additional busing to make the ride times a little shorter, or have a little more room on the buses," Murphy said in an interview Wednesday.
Murphy said it's too early in the process to determine whether it might be possible to take some buses out of service.
"If we have the opportunity, once we have redispersed the buses we have under contract to areas we need them, and remove them from areas where they are no longer needed, then we may have some cost savings, but what we're actually looking at remains to be seen."
The area boards currently contract for 187 buses at an annual cost of $12.6 million.
