MP 'making progress' on Tararua school bus issues

Kieran McAnulty is gathering information on cases of parents whose children are currently ineligible for transport assistance which he will take to the Minister of Education. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Wairarapa MP Kieran McAnulty is pleased with progress in his bid to aid parents of children caught up in rules over eligibility for school buses.

McAnulty had been in talks with the Ministry of Education and the school bus service provider for Tararua and the Wairarapa, Go Bus, after he'd heard of a number of issues with the service.

Those issues included timetable mix-ups and children being dropped off before parents could pick them up from the bus stop.

Some parents had also complained that their children could no longer use the school bus because under Ministry of Education rules, they were not eligible.

Up until the end of last year, Go Bus had been allowing those students to take the bus to school if they paid a fare.

The ministry criteria stated that students were able to get transport assistance if they attended the closest state or state-integrated school, lived at least 3.2km from their school if they were primary and at least 4.8km if they were secondary and had no public transport option.

However, some parents had chosen to send their children to a different school, rather than their closest one, which then made their children ineligible.

McAnulty hoped to get a review of that criteria, which had been in place for a long time, across successive governments.

People had raised the issue with him and it was an issue he was more than happy to take up as an MP.

"What the eligibility criteria doesn't do is it doesn't account for the real-life circumstances of families, like those that might shift dairy farms, but want to keep their children in the same school for the final couple of years.

"The premise behind eligibility is if you live a certain distance away from the nearest school, then you qualify for a bus. On the whole, people do go to the nearest school, but there's always a good reason why that might not happen. And that's where it falls down."

He understood the need for an eligibility criteria and wasn't advocating for it to be scrapped but was advocating for some level of flexibility to account for the genuine reasons why a child wouldn't go to the nearest school.

He was keen to hear from parents and collect some examples, so he could put forward a case.

Go Bus say vehicles are specified to the ministry contract. Photo / Leanne Warr

Go Bus spokesman Russell Turnbull couldn't comment on McAnulty's bid to get a review of the ministry's policy.

He said the policy was something Go Bus couldn't control.

He also was unable to comment on any specific case without knowing all the details but did say that managers of each branch had some discretion on whether they could take a particular student, although they'd often have to refer that to their regional manager.

"Where carrying an ineligible student would have consequences to the vehicle size we needed to use etcetera that would become more of an issue.

"Our vehicles are specified to the ministry contract, the size of bus matches that, which often means we don't have space to carry ineligibles."

Go Bus had about 660 school bus routes across the country, so every area was different, Turnbull said.

McAnulty said he couldn't ask for a free-for-all situation and if there wasn't a bus already going from home to school, that wasn't a reasonable request.

"People aren't asking for that though. All they're asking for is, when a bus goes past their gate anyway, and goes to the vicinity of the school that their children go to, that they be allowed to go on there."

He said many parents were happy to pay for the service.

He hadn't finalised what it was he was going to be proposing as he was still in the process of working through the cases and building his understanding of the issue.

However, he was happy with the progress that had been made and was confident that outstanding issues would be resolved.