THUNDER BAY – Student Transportation Services is reminding parents and students to know the bus they’re supposed to be on.
The warning came after a concerned parent posted to a local Facebook group that her sons got on the wrong bus in the morning on their way to school, and she and her husband were unable to track them down for two hours.
While she said her husband bears some of the responsibility for not checking the bus number, there didn’t appear to be proper checks and balances to open the school year, as she noted the bus driver in question simply welcomed her boys aboard.
“The bus driver stopped, super friendly, welcomed them on the bus and my husband didn’t think to check the new bus number,” the mother posted to Facebook. “I got suspicious when I noticed another kid was still waiting and then their real bus showed up. They were M.I.A. for two hours while my husband called the bus lines 100 times and no one answered.”
The woman, who wants reassurance the proper protocols are in place, said her sons were ultimately located and wound up at the correct school.
Unfortunately, students getting on the wrong bus is an annual occurrence, said Craig Murphy, who heads up the school-bus consortium in Thunder Bay.
There are things parents, educators and students alike can do to avoid it happening to them, Murphy said.
“There’s lots of things in place to ensure students are boarding the right bus, but unfortunately it does happen, from time to time. This year there are a lot of new routes and new changes and the (route) names have all changed. So, we want to put messaging out there to take extra care for parents and students to know their bus number.”
This number is displayed on the front, back and the side of each bus.
The changes to the service came at the behest of the province, which cut funding to student transportation across Ontario, starting this month. Distances for bus eligibility were doubled, leaving many families scrambling to get their children to and from the classroom.
Murphy said the consortium works with the school to ensure the list of students taking the bus is correct.
“Sometimes students do sneak on the wrong bus. They want to go with their friends instead of the bus they’re assigned to, or sometimes they just get confused and they get on the wrong bus. In order to reduce the number of incidents of that happening, and causing delays getting the students back to where they need to be, we just want to put the word out that it’s very important that students are boarding the right bus at the end of the day at the schools.”
