Stock to introduce new school bus-tracking tools, safety measures this fall

Chantal Pelham-Edwards was wondering where her seven-year-old son Henry was on June 1 when his bus from St. Margaret's Bay Elementary School didn't arrive by 3 p.m. 

"By about 3:30 p.m., we were starting to get a little bit curious about why he wasn't home yet," Pelham-Edwards said.

Instead of hearing directly from Stock Transportation, the company that runs school buses in the Halifax area, she got a text from her neighbour saying the bus hadn't left the school yet. By the time she arrived at school to get Henry, the bus still wasn't there. It was nearly two hours late to pick up the kids.

These are the kinds of issues that Stock is planning to address this fall with new bus tracking tools, safety measures and a complaints database.

In a June 4 press release, Stock said it's heard about transportation "challenges" from many parents this year.

"Getting our students to and from school safely and on time, while keeping you informed, is our focus," said Crystal Truax, Stock's regional manager, and Ron Heiman, the operations services director for the Halifax Regional Centre For Education, in a joint press release.

Passenger manifests and tracking tools coming for fall

A new website, BusPlanner, will send parents and guardians email notifications about changes to routes, delays or cancellations for Halifax-area schools. The site will be connected to a tracking app, Where's My Bus, which will replace a previous bus-tracking app.

Stock is also launching a site for concerns and complaints, BusReport, which will require a response time of 24 to 72 hours, depending on the severity of the issue.

Passenger manifests will be also introduced this fall to ensure Stock knows where every student is and to prevent overcrowding, the company said in the release.

Stock previously announced that on-board cameras facing the driver and the road will be installed by the end of 2019. The cameras will have sensors to detect unusual driving such hard braking and sudden swerves, as well as to catch cars that illegally pass buses.

Parents say Stock is silent on complaints 

Pelham-Edwards called and emailed Stock and said she still hasn't received a response about what happened.

"I get that issues come up and things happen," she said. "That doesn't bother me almost as much as just not having any communication from Stock since then."

She's one of hundreds of parents in a Facebook group concerned about safety, late buses, overcrowding and poor communication from Stock.

"There's just not a whole lot of confidence in making sure they're going to adhere to what they're supposed to be doing," she said. "The communication is just really, really challenging."

Emma Skeete's son's bus was over an hour late in early May. She said she, too, didn't get a timely notification from the company and heard about the delay from a neighbour.

Skeete said there is a "serious lack of information about when our kids are arriving at school or when they are arriving home."

Pelham-Edwards is cautiously optimistic that the coming changes may help.

"If they utilize them and implement them, then great, I'd be thrilled about that. I guess I'm not 100 per cent confident that it's going to work in practice as much as they're talking about it working in theory," she said.

"I'd be happy to be wrong on that."

Stock did not make anyone available for an interview, but in an emailed statement, chief operations officer Terri Lowe said the company is not aware of any outstanding complaints. She said Stock currently notifies parents about late buses on Twitter.

A rough year on the road

A report from the Nova Scotia Utility and Review Board in November found Stock had been running a charter business without a licence and outlined how it had violated safety rules, obstructed inspectors, falsified records and demanded that drivers work beyond permitted hours.

Stock was found to have breached the law at least eight times, including carrying hockey teams to games within Nova Scotia and out of province as far away as Boston. Some of those trips came after Stock was specifically warned it did not have a licence to carry out those charter operations.

A Stock executive apologized to the UARB in March, blaming the former general manager of Eastern Canada operations, Troy Phinney, for the violations.