Friday November 4 marked the end of an era at Bowen Island Community School, one where parents volunteer to direct traffic in the parking lot as drivers from across the island jostle into a convenient location to drop their children for school.
“Despite their best efforts it was chaos, and it remained a safety hazard,” says co-chair of the BICS PAC (Parent Advisory Council), Shawn Cole. “And having the school bus only four days a week was a real penalty to families with two working parents.”
On August 10 of this year, the BC Ministry of Transportation announced the creation of a $14.7 million Student Transportation Fund. School districts were offered the opportunity to apply for money to improve transportation services for students in various ways.
Members of the BICS PAC, as well as Councilor Melanie Mason jumped at the opportunity to re-instate the Friday bus service, which was cut in 2010.
Julia Leiterman, Secretary Treasurer for the West Vancouver School District explains that until that time, school buses transported all students to their catchment school, five days a week.
“We, along with the other school districts, faced a major budget crunch in 2010,” Leiterman says. “We hired an external consultant to look at our bus service and the recommendation that consultant made was to create a more efficient system based on the Ministry of Education’s provincial walk-limits. Those limits deem that children between kindgergarten and grade three should be able to walk to school if they live less than 4km from the school; from grade 4 up, that distance is 4.8 kilometers.”
Leiterman says that it was recognized that Bowen Island was unique, in that without sidewalks or proper shoulders along many of the roads walkability is an issue.
“We took it back to islanders to come up with a solution,” she says. “We could have provided service five days a week for people outside of the 4km zone, or less service for everyone. This latter choice was agreed upon, and that’s when the bus stopped running on Fridays.”
Councilor Melanie Mason says that while holding consultations across the Island for the Integrated Transportation Master Plan (ITMP), the four-days a week school bus service was an issue that parents frequently brought up.
“I’m glad they’ve reinstated the service, it has huge environmental and traffic safety benefits,” says Mason. “That said, moving forward I am hoping our Transportation Master plan will be able to address more active transportation options for students especially within 4km of the school, where the province is not mandated to provide school transportation. That way if funding does again become an issue families can have alternative and safe options other than relying on parents driving children to school or the ferry.”
