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Transportation FAQ

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Very reasonably so, parents often have questions related to school bus transportation, whether about something as vital as safety or as commonplace as a forgotten pair of mittens on a bus. In order to be responsive to the needs of parents, the transportation department has assembled a list of frequently asked questions and their corresponding answers. We hope this is helpful in making you feel more comfortable with and aware of how your children are safely transported to and from school each day. Should you have any questions that are not addressed in this list, please feel free to contact us at 204.669.0202.

  • Parents are first asked to make sure that the buses are operating and not cancelled due to poor weather or extreme cold. (Please see the “Procedures for extreme weather” on page 15.) Normally, according to policy, we ask that your child be at the bus stop five minutes before the schedule arrival time. If after 10 minutes the bus has not yet arrived, you should call the transportation department at 204.669.0202.

  • Your child may have different drivers between the morning and afternoon routes. However, they will be consistent and in those routes from day to day, with the exception of sick leave, leave of absence and employee turnover. 
    Regarding buses, your child’s bus number will be consistent most of the year, with the exception of when the bus is taken out of service for scheduled or unscheduled maintenance. When this occurs, our spare buses are used as replacements. The spare buses are numbered in the 90s. Because of the size of the fleet and the number of students who are affected when a spare bus is used, parents are not notified of the change.

  • Drivers are not permitted to adjust routes, times or stops. Only certain students, whose needs are addressed through a personal transportation plan, are eligible for door-to-door service. This service is typically restricted to students with certain disabilities.

    For other students, service is provided in accordance with provincial and divisional guidelines that assure a maximum distance to the stop is not greater than 800 metres. Within these guidelines, every effort is made to improve route efficiency by clustering students to stops and, where possible, providing service on major streets.

  • The division is responsible for the safety of students using division-owned vehicles while the students are on the vehicle. It is the parents’/guardians’ responsibility to ensure the safety of students from home to the school bus pick-up point, until boarding the school bus and from disembarkation from the school bus to home. We do, however, track our new kindergarten students and highly recommend you bring them and meet them at the bus stop. Grade 1 through 12 students will be let off at their bus stop even if a parent is not there to meet them. You can make a “Must be met” request by contacting the transportation department. This stipulation will be relayed to the driver on the student manifest.

  • Upon reaching the stop, the bus driver will radio the dispatcher and request a call to your residence to notify you that the school bus has arrived at the stop. The driver will be instructed to keep your child on board and continue on with the route. After completion of the route, the principal will be notified and your child will be returned to the school. If you are in the habit of meeting your child but have not requested a “Must be Met by Parent” and, for whatever reason, are delayed in getting to the stop, the same will apply. Please remember that school buses are triple routed, and it could be some time until your child is returned to the school. Also, should you be unable to meet the bus and you send someone the driver has not seen before, you should call the transportation office to notify them of the change.

  • Because of the large volume of students we transport, we request that only parents of kindergarten students and students with special needs call to cancel transportation on a particular day or route. For example, you may call if you need to cancel the morning pickup or afternoon take home. The same would apply if your child is going to be picked up rather than going home by bus. This saves time and worry for the drivers, wondering why their children have not come to the bus.

  • Several ways. First, each driver has a student passenger list that provides him/her with information such as name, grade, address, pickup or drop-off point, time, school and any special instructions. Examples of special instructions would be medical requirements (e.g. allergies, EpiPens®) or “Must Be Met By Parent” requests.

    Also, each kindergarten student is supplied with a badge the first day of school, identifying their name, school, drop-off point and take-home bus number. Teachers will pin the badges on students’ backpacks. As well, the driver is in constant radio contact with the dispatcher. The dispatchers have access to all of the same data that the school has on your child.

  • Some situations that cause the bus to be late include traffic, road closures, weather, vehicle breakdowns or circumstances from the prior bus route. In some instances, the bus is held up at the school waiting for students. The same holds true when picking up students. If 20 students are one minute late for the pickup, the bus will run 20 minutes late. This is very profound considering some buses can pick up as many as 250 students during the course of the morning routes.

    The transportation department is in constant radio contact with all of the buses. Should a driver foresee they will be 10 minutes behind schedule, they are required to inform the base and, in turn, the base will post delay notifications on X (formerly Twitter) and send out SchoolMessenger notifications to the parents of students on affected routes. 

    At the beginning of the year, please expect the buses to run several minutes late for usually a week, as this is an exciting time for parents. It takes time to have pictures taken and to say and wave goodbye. And in some cases, some of our new riders can be very reluctant to leave their parents and go off alone to a strange place.

  • We make every attempt to adhere to the pickup and drop-off times indicated. For the morning pickup, if the change is less than five minutes, the driver will notify your child of the change. If there is a change in stop time greater than five minutes or a change in stop location or bus number, the transportation department will provide written notification to you. The afternoon drop-off time indicated in your letter is an approximate time only. Buses do run late at times, and can run early, as well. If your child’s bus arrives earlier than the normal drop-off time, it will likely be because some students who would normally be dropped off before your child are not on the bus, putting it ahead of schedule.

  • A formula is used to determine bus capacity. It is assumed that elementary students (K–6) will ride three to a seat and junior high to 14 senior high students (7–12) will ride two to a seat. If the bus has three elementary or two high school students per seat, it may seem that the bus is overcrowded, but it will not, in fact, be over capacity. It is our goal to fully utilize all the space on the buses in our fleet.

  • Bus stops are placed at centralized locations that can be safely accessed by a significant number of students to minimize the time, length and mileage of the routes. If you have concerns about your child’s safety, you are encouraged to accompany your child to and from the bus stop or to arrange a neighbourhood buddy to walk with a younger child. Students in the division who live less than 1.6 kilometres from their school do not receive transportation, therefore asking students to walk 800 metres or less to a bus stop is not considered unreasonable.

  • Students with the same home address attending different schools may need to take different buses due to the logistics of school bus routing. Bus routes are typically designed to optimize efficiency, considering factors such as the number of stops, distance, traffic patterns, and the locations of the schools. While students from the same area may share a bus route if attending the same school, those attending different schools may require separate routes to ensure timely and safe transportation for all students involved. This approach helps streamline transportation operations and manage the complexities of accommodating multiple schools’ schedules while ensuring smooth, reliable bus service.

  • The transportation department re-evaluates the routing each new school year. Student demographics are affected from year to year due to graduations and people moving in and out of the school division. As a result, the routing can change dramatically. If there are no longer students that qualify for transportation in accordance with divisional policy in the area, buses will not be routed there. Subsequently, there would not be fee-for-service capabilities. As well, should the bus be at capacity, there would not be room for fee-for-service students. See the Fee-for-Service Busing section for more information.

  • A week before the start of school, each kindergarten student who will be using school bus transportation will receive a letter containing all the necessary busing information, such as the student’s name, school, drop-off point, bus route number, and other relevant details to ensure a smooth school bus ride experience. At the beginning of the school year, your child’s teacher will attach a tag with the busing information to their backpack.

  • Seat belts are not required in school buses because research done by both the American and Canadian regulatory agencies determined that compartmentalization was a better solution. Under this concept, seat backs in school buses are made high, wide and thick. All metal surfaces are covered with thick foam padding. The seat is required to be anchored to the floor and will not pull loose during a collision. The students are less prone to injury by being bounced between the seats than by being strapped in.

    Compartmentalization works well for one, two or three students in a seat. Today’s 39-inch seats can accommodate three younger students, two large students or a combination of the two. Arranging and adjusting seat belts for this combination would be difficult, if not impossible.

    As well, it would be difficult for the driver to enforce 60 to 70 students to put on their seat belts and keep them on. Also, compartmentalization, once it has done its energy-absorbing job, leaves the students free to escape the bus. Seat belts could leave students strapped in, perhaps upside down and in a bus that has caught fire.

  • Students must ride on their assigned buses only. Parents can request a different existing stop on the same route, but it must be consistent every day. Students are not allowed to go on other buses for reasons such as birthday parties, sleepovers, etc.

  • Drivers check their buses at the end of each route. Items left on the bus will remain on the bus for several days and children are encouraged to ask the driver if they have found the item. After a certain period, drivers take unclaimed items to the office, and at the end of the school year the items are donated to charity. You can help by labelling all of your child’s belongings with their name and perhaps the school name.

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