By Josh Hall (Twitter: @Vancan19)

SOFTENING THE BLOW

Chinook’s Edge lowers busing fee increase for kindergarten families

Feb 7, 2020 | 9:39 AM

Busing fees for some families with kindergarten students in Chinook’s Edge School Division (CESD) won’t be going up as much as was expected.

The division announced last month it would be increasing busing fees for town students and introducing a new fee for rural students starting for the 2020-21 school year.

It’s since been decided that because kindergarten is a mandated half-time program, kindergarten families will only pay 50 per cent of the increased fee.

Currently, kindergarten families pay $156/year for busing if they live between 1.6-2.4 km away from the school, and $312 if they’re less than 1.6 km away. Rural families currently pay nothing.

Starting this fall, all kindergarten families who live in town will pay $250. Families with full-time grade school students will go from $300/child under the current model to $500.

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Meantime, rural kindergarten families will pay a fee of $100, half of the new $200 fee for all students living out of town.

Chinook’s Edge Superintendent Kurt Sacher says the division has been dealing with a transportation budget deficit for years and has tried numerous things to get out of it, but to no avail.

The division’s bus system costs $7.2 million annually to run, but they only get a $6 million transportation grant from the province, leaving a $1.2 million shortfall for 2019-2020.

Each bus would need to be carrying 46 students daily in order to break even under the current fee structure. Sixty-five CESD buses currently operate below that threshold.