Province won’t bail out bus system

Central Okanagan parents shouldn’t expect the province to ride to the rescue of the financially challenged school bus system, a trustee says.

No information was presented at a recent meeting of B.C. school trustees that the government plans to change the way it provides money for school buses.

“There was no indication that funding for transportation would be restored,” Kelowna trustee Norah Bowman writes in a report on her attendance at the BC School Trustees Association.

In fact, Bowman says, a top provincial official said that while transportation funding may be a burning political issue in the Central Okanagan, that isn’t the case in other parts of the province.

“The answer was that this might be our school district’s problem, but not all school district’s have this problem,” Bowman says. “Some have other problems, like heating.”

School bus funding has long been a contentious issue in the Central Okanagan largely because of past decisions taken by trustees.

The current and previous boards have simply chosen to provide a much more extensive school busing system than provincial regulations require.

More than 5,000 Kelowna-area kids ride a school bus.

But ridership fees paid by parents have not come close to covering the full cost of running the system. So an ever-larger public subsidy, taken directly from the general school operating grant given by the province to the school district, has been required to run the school buses.

Even with the board’s recent decision to increase the ridership fee from $225 to $300 per year, a large public subsidy will be required.

Projected total busing costs next year are $5.1 million, with only about one-quarter of that coming from ridership fees. That means a subsidy of more than $3 million will have to be provided — money that won’t be available for in-class programs or services to students.