London Free Press - Local News - Bus, boards money woes may ground field trips

London Free Press - Local News - Bus, boards money woes may ground field tripsBus, boards money woes may ground field trips

Mon, September 11, 2006

By KATE DUBINSKI, LONDON FREE PRESS REPORTER



In a move that would affect thousands of students, school bus companies will no longer provide field-trip services during peak hours as of next week unless they get more cash for rising fuel costs.

The withdrawal of so-called prime-time charter service by13 school bus companies will go into effect this Friday unless there’s an agreement reached with the London District Catholic and Thames Valley District school boards.

Trustees at the Catholic board were to be told about the issue at Monday night’s board meeting and Thames board trustees will discuss the issue Tuesday.

“There is the possibility of an interruption in transportation services for extra-curricular (events) for athletics and the like,” said Joe Rapai, the Catholic board’s director of education. “That’s what we want to avoid. We don’t want to put students in the middle.”

The two sides are still negotiating the issue.

Speaking before the board meeting, Rapai said trustees who have had to make cuts to everything from transportation to staffing in their budget, were unlikely to reopen the budget to give the bus companies more money.

“(I hope) the (education) ministry will recognize that the boards are caught in the middle. We don’t want to start the school year on this note,” he said.

Both boards offered the thirteen bus operators, part of a group called the Western Ontario School Bus Association, a two-per-cent increase this year for among other things, wages, insurance, repairs and fuel.

“They say that the province allowed them two per cent. Anyone who knows about transportation knows that two per cent doesn’t allow for what prices of diesel oil has done to us,” said Mike Murphy, owner of J. & T. Murphy Limited. “We have to depend on the boards. Our agreement is with the boards, not with the province.”

A report prepared for trustees indicated the bus companies want a 5.5-per-cent increase in bus rates.

“Eliminating prime-time charters will reduce our spare bus and spare driver costs and some of our fuel consumption,” the operators wrote in a letter to the school boards.

“This is an unprecedented option that we feel we must implement in order to continue to provide safe, secure, on-time, home-to-school transportation for your students and eliminate our cost of prime-time subsidies.”

Murphy said he hopes school trips and sporting events that need buses during peak times, when most buses are being used to get kids to-and-from school, will be rescheduled.

If the bus operators withdraw their services, it will have “a significant impact” on the Thames Valley District school board, said Brian Greene, treasurer of business services.

How many students will be affected if the stoppage goes ahead is hard to determine because field trips are booked on the school level, a report to Catholic trustees says.

But it’s safe to say the impact will be far-reaching, because the bus companies operate in Elgin, Middlesex, Oxford and London. The 13 companies include major companies like Elgin Bus Lines, Laidlaw Education Services, McNaughton Bus Lines Limited, Voyageur Transportation, and J. & T. Murphy Limited.

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