By John Francis
I have heard complaints that elementary-age schoolkids are spending up to two hours each way on the school bus to Bruce Peninsula District School in Lion’s Head.
Parents tell me that one bus starts pickups around 6:35AM in Tobermory and arrives at BPDS around 8:30, although sometimes the elementary kids aren’t allowed off the bus until 8:40 if there isn’t a teacher available for yard duty.
Two hours on a bus? That shouldn’t be allowed, right?
And it’s not just a couple of kids, either. Ten Tobermory kids are picked up before 7:00AM and more than twenty are on the bus for more than 75 minutes.
I contacted our Member of Provincial Parliament, Paul Vickers, our Trustee Jane Thomson (who is also Chair of Bluewater District School Board) and Shared School Services (a consortium that runs the buses for BWDSB and Bruce-Grey Catholic District School Board).
The results were, to say the least, instructive.
MPP Vickers sent me a carefully researched email, which included links to various documents including the Ontario Ministry of Education’s policy document entitled “Common Reference Standards for 2025-26 Routing Simulation”
The Standards prescribe Maximum Ride Times of 60-75 minutes for Elementary Students and 60-90 minutes for Secondary Students. But it includes a caveat: “For some students, geographic circumstances, such as the physical distance from the designated school, may require exceptions to the thresholds noted above.”
That makes sense. White River kids have to go to Wawa and Google Maps says that’s 93km and takes 57 minutes just to drive the distance. For Hornepayne to Hearst it’s 132km and an hour and twenty-seven minutes.
But the Tobermory kids are on the bus for two hours when it’s only a half-hour drive to the school.
Dylan Birley, Supervisor of Transportation for Shared Services explained in an email that:
“Two large buses are already utilized to service the northern peninsula as best we can, given the nature of where students reside in relation to Bruce Peninsula District School in Lion’s Head. While both routes are underutilized at approximately 75-80%, we remain committed to two buses in this geographical area as part of our ongoing efforts to reduce ride times. The second bus, which starts in the Tobermory area, comes up as far as Dorcas Bay Road to assist with getting students on the west side of the region to Lion’s Head as quickly as possible.
Between the two routes, there are up to 86 riders needing service north of Lion’s Head.”
Trustee Jane Thomson hadn’t heard about these long bus rides. She was surprised to hear about them and promised to ask about them. But she suggested that parent complaints would be the most effective way to solve this.
The Chair of the Board can’t fix this with one wave of her wand? Well, no — she can’t. Nor should she be able to.
A Board of Education is like a municipal government in a lot of ways. The Mayor speaks for Council but can only talk about past decisions. In future decisions, he is but one vote of five.
Individual Councillors can’t demand policy changes from municipal employees. Imagine, if you will, what would happen if one Councillor demanded the Roads Supervisor devote all his efforts to Pike Bay while another demanded a concerted effort for Cape Hurd. It would be chaos. So there’s a set of protocols for how this works: individual Councillors speak to the CAO, who acts as a liaison with the rest of staff. Council decides what it wants to accomplish; staff decides how to accomplish it.
The best way to get something done in MNBP is not to talk to the Mayor — it’s to write a letter and ask that it be included in Council’s Agenda, which requires Mayor and Council to acknowledge the issue.
So Bruce Peninsula parents need to do two things: complain to Shared Services (which is not directly supervised by the boards it serves) (contact@stscgb.ca)and complain to Bluewater DSB to ask that the complaint be addressed by the Trustees.
The question I would like to see answered is this: how many towns in Bluewater District School Board have the entire town’s elementary students on a bus for an hour and a half each way?
There are lots of possible solutions. For example: send four small buses instead of two large ones.
The Provincial Standards policy document prescribes flexible approaches to managing “Low-Volume Demography”. Full-size school buses are the least preferable choice. More preferable choices include: Parent-driven vehicles [“A vehicle owned and operated by a parent; and used to transport their own children and children other than their own for home-to-school (and vice versa) student transportation”] and taxis (operated under contract).
So Shared Services definitely has alternatives. They just don’t like them.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease. We need to squeak.
