Thousands of students in eastern Ontario’s sprawling Renfrew County won’t be taking a bus on their first day of school.
The first day of classes for its English public and Catholic boards began Wednesday without a contract with its bus operators.
The Renfrew County Joint Transportation Consortium co-ordinates routes and pays buses for the two boards, teaching about 10,000 students in an area west of Ottawa spanning about 7,650 square kilometres, which is larger than P.E.I.
It and the Renfrew County School Bus Operators — made up of six companies that offer services in the county, but not a formal union — have been warning families for a few weeks.
Operators say they’re underpaid and the consortium is holding back money from the education ministry. The consortium, which gets its money from the ministry through the boards, says it can’t dedicate more money to buses without taking it from front-line services.
Now that their warning has become reality, parents and educators in the area are working overtime to handle the start of the year.
Parents improvise on Facebook
When Shawna Walker first heard the buses might not be running, she thought her two boys have to miss school altogether.
Walker is a single mother without a car or family in the area to help out.
Thankfully, another member of the community made a Facebook group for carpooling.
“[The driver] is going to come by tonight just to introduce herself to [the kids], so that she’s not a stranger,” Walker said Tuesday.
Ceallaigh Shaw offered a seat in her car on a Renfrew County Facebook page.
Her son is too young for school, but Shaw posted to say she has an empty front seat on her way to daycare.
“It’s not something you want to be concerned about when school rolls around,” she told CBC. “It blows my mind.”
She said, if she was in their position, she would also struggle to pick her child up at the end of the day with her work schedule.
How one school is adapting
Queen Elizabeth Public School in the Town of Renfrew is just one school that’s had to rapidly adapt.
Anne Lefebvre, a Grade 6 teacher at the school, said it will have to improvise because it serves large, rural areas.
“We have kids coming from as far as 35 to 50 kilometres away and it’s not a feasible situation for families to deal with,” she said. Those who live in town can walk, “but our rural students, we really don’t know what to expect.”
One thing they can prepare for is increased traffic. Lefebvre said her school’s parking lot isn’t built to manage so many cars at once, so the administration has been proactive in organizing the drop-offs and pick-ups to go smoothly.
For the kids who can’t attend at all, there will be work packages so students can do their work from home and some teachers might be able to post material online through Google Classroom. Lefebvre said her school won’t be able to offer hybrid learning where students watch a teacher through a camera.
The president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation said it’s unfair to students if schools are left to figure out how to make this work on their own.
“It’s so unfair to the kids,” said Karen Littlewood. “You get through a pandemic, and you’re doing online learning. And now this is the answer when you’re not funding education. It’s just to say to the kids, go back to online learning.”
Pembroke’s French school and the Algonquins of Pikwakanagan First Nation’s own buses are not affected by the dispute.