Provincially the school bus industry has been struggling with a school bus driver shortage for the past five or more years. The introduction of COVID-19, and the implications this has for the demographic of the average school bus driver, has worsened the driver shortage for this coming school year.
The result is there will be bus route cancellations starting September 8, 2020. Known cancellations will be posted each evening
by 6PM for the following day. There may be routes cancelled early in the morning due to illness or other causes so parents will want to view the cancellation site evening and morning. Parents can see the postings here.
Parents are strongly encouraged to view this website regularly. Parents that have created an account in the Parent Portal section of the website can subscribe to a specific route to receive an email or text if that route is delayed or cancelled. This will prevent the need for parents to repeatedly check the website.
Locally in Grey and Bruce counties the shortage has resulted in nine routes not having a driver starting Tuesday September 8th. These nine routes are 036, 808, 901, 863, 257, 724, 726, 1023 and 1035. Students riding these routes must find an alternate transportation mode to school starting Tuesday September 8th. These routes are not expected to run for weeks, and their cancellations will be posted daily. Parents can see the postings at https://mybrucegreyschoolbus.ca/Alerts.
In addition to routes that are cancelled for longer periods of time, some other routes will need to be cancelled due to unforeseen driver absences. These will have to be cancelled the morning the operator becomes aware of the shortage. For this reason it is important that parents either subscribe for their child’s bus route, or monitor the website each morning.
The nine routes represent 3% of the total 325 routes in the district. The consortium expects that ridership will be down with some students studying from home and others choosing alternate transportation. The Consortium will be working to optimize routes to be able to provide transportation to all students of the coterminous boards.
Optimistically, if the system does not continue to lose bus drivers, route optimization will allow for students to start receiving transportation as early as the third week of school. Updates to the status of this unfortunate situation will be made to this site throughout September.
source: Student Transortation Service Consortium of Grey-Bruce
