Calgary school bus stops to be revamped after education minister intervenes

The Calgary Board of Education (CBE) says it is working on a plan to reconfigure bus routes to shorten the distance students have to walk to their stops.

In a bid to cut costs, the CBErecently replaced a number of regular bus stops with a handful of so-called "congregated bus stops" forcing somestudents to walk 2.4 kilometres to catch a bus.

But after numerous complaints from parents, Education Minister David Eggen intervened, asking the CBE to re-examine its maximum walking-distance policy.

• Calgary school bus stop changes on the way after parents raise concerns

On Friday, the board released an initial report saying the new bus stops should be in place by mid-October. The changes will be discussed at the board's meeting on Tuesday.

"Some parents have expressed concern about the travel distance to the bus stops," saidCBEsuperintendent Frank Coppinger. "We have heard in administration these concerns and we have already started the process to modify certain routes and adjust the bus stop locations."

But the CBE says the interconnected nature of the routes means that all of them might have to be reconfigured to address the problem, and that some routes might need to be added.

Parents thank minister for stepping in

"I am going to argue that we are not spending money to fix a mistake.We're addressing an issue.It will have some cost potentially.There will be some offsetting revenue," saidBrad Grundy,the board's chief financial officer, whodefends the initial decision.

"We made the decisionsaround service levels recognizing that the funding we received from the province is not sufficient to provide the service level that we had been providing in 2014-2015.We had to make changes."

The CBE had made the decision in Mayto help balance their budgets.

ButEggensaid the CBE had received an additional $1 million from the province for transportation costs this year, and could also dip into its transportation reserve to put more buses into service.

Lisa Davis, who heads the Calgary Association of Parents and School Councils, says the minister was right to step in.

"We really support the minister getting directly involved and it's quite unprecedented but what I think it speaks to is the severity of the problem and alsothe reality that decisions around this have been poorly made," she said.

Concerns raised in the past

Her organization met with school board officials last May.

"They did not take the advice then. They did not listen to the concerns of parents about having four days to rearrange their whole lives, soit's encouraging that the minister has moved very quickly to address this directly with the board," she said.

ButDavis says the CBE'snewest stance just shows senior officials have missed the opportunity to do a major rethink of the issue.

"We're going to have elementary students walking1.6 kilometres and junior high students walking 1.8 kilometres," she said.

"That's what they told the board they were going to do inJune and that hasn't changed, so we're not really seeing where this has addressed the parental concerns."

The public board transports more than 38,000students each day by bus.