Page 1278 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 11 April 2018
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have already left. What kind of example is this setting for our children when the government is saying it is okay to arrive at school late or leave school early? How can the government tell children it values their education, if it cannot get them to and from school on time?
Another problem is dedicated school bus services that are scheduled to depart up to 40 minutes after the end of the school day, despite the agreed 30-minute end-of-class threshold. When buses leave too long after the end of school, kids are left to loiter around the school grounds. This means schools face a difficult decision: they must decide either to leave children unsupervised or eat in to their overtime budgets to pay teachers to wait around and supervise them. Nothing about this is efficient. Students would be much better off getting home to spend time with their families, do homework, or engage in extracurricular activities. Standing around at a bus stop supervising students is hardly the best use of a teacher’s time, either. And school funding could be put to much greater use achieving educational outcomes.
In addition to bus punctuality, parents are concerned about the overcrowding of school buses. Some of these dedicated school bus services are so jam-packed by the time they have made their last pick-up, that it poses a serious safety threat to students. I have heard from parents that because of overcrowding drivers sometimes refuse to open the back door of the bus at every stop and that because buses are so full, children cannot make their way to the front of the bus to get off in time, particularly the smallest and most vulnerable children. Sometimes this means that children miss their stops. This is of great concern to parents. This creates stressful situations for drivers and students.
Putting drivers and students in an adversarial relationship is not fair on either, and it is a threat to the safety of both. Drivers do not need any distractions when they are transporting our precious cargo. A bus overfilled with stressed and anxious students is a disincentive to catch the bus and is an accident waiting to happen.
Parents and schools have also raised concerns about the lack of direct routes both to and from some schools. Ideally, school buses will take students straight from their homes directly to schools without having to change buses at an interchange. Parents want to put their kids on the bus in the morning and know it will take them directly to school. They want to know their kids can get straight on the bus in the afternoon and come directly home. Most parents do not want their kids hanging around bus interchanges before or after school.
If parents cannot be confident that the school bus will take their children directly to or from school, many will look for other options. If parents hear that their children are being crammed onto packed school buses, missing their stops because they physically cannot get off the bus, they are going to look for a better way. If parents cannot trust the buses to get their children safely to and from school on time, many are going to choose to do the job themselves. Many parents are going to choose to drive their children to school; and it is certainly their right to do so.
Part of the problem is the lack of publicly available data on school bus services. ACTION performance benchmarks do not provide separate data on school buses, and
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