Younger students still have to ride three to a seat on some Mount Aspiring College (MAC) school buses, and it’s too early to know how the school bus service will fare this winter. 

That was the message from MAC bus coordinator Simon Nyhof, who spoke to the Wanaka App on Tuesday (February 26). 

“We haven’t really seen the big picture yet,” Simon said. “Summer is generally not too bad, but the real test is the winter season, when a lot more people send their children to school by bus.” 

Go Bus, the operator for all Wanaka school buses, has made a couple of changes since the start of the school year to accommodate larger student numbers - such as putting a bus with a larger capacity on the Cardrona route. 

Simon said there were initially some issues with overcrowding on the two Lake Hawea buses, but these have been sorted out by making sure each student took the bus they were allocated. 

MAC has submitted address information for all its students to the Ministry of Education and is waiting for the ministry to send back a list of who is eligible for which bus. 

“Then we’ll know exactly where we stand for the winter,” Simon said. “It may be that we have to issue bus cards to each student, stating which bus they are eligible to catch.”

This option would reduce flexibility for students and mean they wouldn’t be able to bring a non-eligible friend home on the bus.

Ultimately, the ministry decides how many buses it will fund. Following a successful campaign by Wanaka Primary School, the ministry committed last year to providing a sufficient number of buses so that no child has to stand on a school bus.

However on several local school bus routes - some of which are shared between MAC, Holy Family School and Wanaka Primary School - the only way the service can ensure all children are seated is to make students in Years 1 to 8 sit three to a two-person seat. 

In February last year, Ministry of Education infrastructure service head Kim Shannon said: “We expect all students on school transport services will be seated from the start of 2021, when new contracts for school transport services are in place. Where possible, within fleet availability and cost constraints, we will look to seat students sooner.” 

But Simon said this wasn’t good enough. “We’ve got to get our kids to school on time so they can get a fair education. It’s the ministry’s job to ensure that happens.”

Simon added that it was not possible for existing buses to do a second run. “You’re looking at an hour’s turnaround in some cases. We can’t have students arriving late for school - parents rightly won’t accept that.” 

“If parents are unhappy with the school bus service, the best thing they can do is to complain directly to the Ministry of Education,” he said.