Driver shortages cause school bus cancellations, prompting apology to parents

Driver shortages are grinding some buses to a halt in the St. James Assiniboa School Division. Jeff Keele reports.

The St. James-Assiniboia School Division is apologizing to parents following an unusual number of school bus cancellations.

Superintendent Jenness Moffatt released a memo to parents about the problem.

“The level of service provided has not met the expectations we hold for ourselves or the standards you rightly expect for your children. On behalf of the division, we sincerely apologize for the frustration, uncertainty, and disruption these issues have caused for families,” wrote Moffatt.

Moffatt told CTV News the division has their own small fleet of buses and drivers. But the bulk come from their private provider, who Moffatt said is having issues with driver shortages, leading to some school bus cancellations.

“We started to note that we were hearing of more and more cancellations coming from our service provider,” Moffatt said.

Parent Janelle Thompson has experienced three to four last-minute cancellations with her child who is in kindergarten. When that happens, they must switch to transit.

“We have to take the transit bus which isn’t too bad; it’s about 15 minutes, and then there’s two different buses, or it’s one bus that’s 40 minutes, and then 10 minutes of walking on either side,” Thompson said.

Moffatt said the division is working with their service provider to boost the number of drivers and doing some scouting of their own.

“We have been looking to other contract services here in the city to help us out, lend a driver, also hired more relief drivers,” Moffatt said.

The division said it’s also looking to add another bus to their fleet to curb the shortages.