Kids face marathon bus trips
Children in for three hours of commuting after quiet rule change allows 7am pick-ups, Adam Dudding reports.
Changes to rural school bus routes mean young pupils will spend three hours a day on winding country roads, which a worried principal says will leave them tired and less able to learn.
Changes to the bus commute at the start of next year are expected to affect 23 schools around provincial New Zealand, after the Ministry of Education quietly changed the rules to allow buses to pick up kids as early as 7am.
Kelvin Woodley, principal of Tapawera Area School in Tasman District, says the ministry has proposed new routes for the free buses used by two-thirds of the school’s 198 pupils.
But a computer algorithm that’s meant to find the optimal route has come up with anomalies including one option that crosses a stream with no bridge.
Until recently, ministry guidelines stated no pickup on the free school bus should be earlier than 7.30am, but Woodley said new guidelines allow timetables to start from 7am.
He says the proposed new routes could add half an hour in each direction, leading to up to three hours’ travelling a day.
‘‘An extra hour a day for a fiveyear-old counts significantly. We need to consider the impact it has on their education.’’
Dairy farmer Sheryl Culling lives around 21km to the west of Tapawera school. Her daughter Alicia, 11, is in Year 6 and Conor, 9, is in Year 4.
Currently the bus picks them up at 8am and drops them at 3.45pm. Culling said merging two routes could mean a 7am pickup. The additional distance would leave her children more tired, ‘‘and everyone knows what tired grumpy kids are like.’’
Kelvin Woodley said he was pushing back at the ministry’s suggested route changes, planned for next year. The system that designed them seemed flawed.
Jerome Sheppard, head of the Ministry of Education infrastructure service, said the ministry always took advice from locallybased staff before finalising routes and would never include roads known to be unsafe.
He recognised students living in remote areas faced significant school journeys, but bus routes were designed to follow ‘‘the most efficient distance possible’’ between their homes and schools.
‘‘If there are any particular concerns on specific routes we would be happy to discuss those concerns,’’ he said.