Sudbury School Bus Consortium says it still needs more drivers
'It has it has been quite a difficult year ... I know that parents were not very happy with the consortium'
For the first time in months, all school bus routes in Sudbury are running.
Some bus routes have been shelved since school began, as some drivers have opted stay home because of COVID-19, and fewer students have been going to school.
The Sudbury Student Services Consortium co-ordinates transportation for the city's four school boards. Executive director Renée Boucher says training new drivers has taken longer than usual because trainers have also been driving bus loads of students to school.
"That training team cannot train seven hours a day if they're driving buses," she said.
"So the entire training team has been doing morning and afternoon routes [and] have only been able to train during the day."
And Boucher says there have been other delays.
"The entire MTO requirements and needing to wait for the medicals to pass, criminal record check to pass and, you know, all of those things do take some time, and especially in the COVID."
Boucher says they are starting to have the capacity to train new drivers after school bus routes are finished for the day.
And they are hopeful that people will continue to come forward to fill vacant positions. She says one of the main bus operators in Sudbury is now offering $20 per hour to try to entice more people to take a school bus driving job.
A national bus operation, called Student Transportation of Canada, has given some assistance to the consortium as well, Boucher says.
"It has it has been quite a difficult year. I know that parents were not very happy with the consortium. A lot of parents were saying, why are you waiting until the last minute? We didn't have a choice. We didn't receive the information, school boards had not received the approval from the ministry," she said.
"So we were all kind of waiting for a direction. And then when we received the direction, well, then we were waiting for parents to confirm whether or not they were going to keep their children at home or send them on a bus. Everything was so very last minute."
The consortium began the school year with 400 buses routes — and that number has since dropped to 396.
Boucher says they will be doing student passenger counts next month.