Bus driver shortage causes some B.C. students to miss school in Sooke school district
Some children who live on the southern tip of Vancouver Island in B.C. have missed school since a bus driver shortage forced the Sooke school district to cancel several routes recently.
For the past two weeks, at least one bus route in the district has been cancelled every day, with some days seeing two or three cancelled routes.
The Sooke school district encompasses Sooke, Langford, Colwood, and Metchosin and operates 39 routes per day. There are currently 44 drivers on staff.
Scott Stinson, Superintendent and CEO of the district said that it does not know exactly how many students have missed class due to the bus cancellations, but 4,000 students rely on the buses.
"If we have drivers that are absent it's a pretty narrow margin for us to be able to accommodate that," said Stinson, adding that illness has recently affected several drivers.
Stinson says the district has had staff who are not typically bus drivers but are licensed to drive a bus fill in, including a transportation manager and bus mechanic.
He says the issue is part of a wider, universal bus driver shortage, and the district is actively trying to recruit more drivers.
Bus driver shortages have also affected students in Surrey and Prince George, as well as in other provinces like Alberta and Ontario.
Fed up parents
Sooke mother Janice Houchin says while the cancellations over the past few weeks were not on her children's route, the family has experienced cancellations before.
There was a month last fall where their route was cancelled at least one to two times a week.
"Parents are just fed up with the unreliability," she said.
With some flexibility, she was still able to get her two kids to school during the cancellations, but for some families, the school bus is their only option.
"For some other parents it's a major, major inconvenience."
She says usually families are notified the night before a route is cancelled, but sometimes they aren't warned until around 6 a.m. on the morning of the cancellation.
On occasion, she received the notification while her children were waiting for the bus.
"That's what makes it tough there because you have no time there to make other plans," Houchin said.
She said bus route cancellations have gotten worse since the COVID-19 pandemic.
