By Adam Ophus

Budget Cuts

Wild Rose School Division planning to contract bussing

May 28, 2019 | 2:24 PM

The Wild Rose School Division is in talks to contract out its student transportation in an effort to save costs in light of budget restraints and legislative changes.

A newly introduced law from Transport Canada states that any new school bus drivers will need to attend the new Mandatory Entry-Level Training (MELT) program.

Larger bussing companies are able to do in-house training to reduce costs, but as the Wild Rose School Division is considered a small bussing company they are forced to outsource the training.

“We’d have to send new drivers, old drivers are grandfathered so they don’t need it, but any new driver, and we would need to send them away for this training and it’s like 50 hours of training at a cost of around $5000,” says Wild Rose School Division Superintendent Brad Volkman.

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Most current bus drivers with Wild Rose are part-time or retirees so the school division doesn’t expect them to pay for it out of pocket.

“It’s not worth it, if the school division has to take that on we already run at a deficit as most school divisions do in the province,” states Volkman “Transportation is drastically underfunded and we already run a deficit in that area.”

Wild Rose is in talks with a company that is looking to take over the routes and possibly take the drivers and other employees with it.

“We have been using contracted bussing services in our northern part of our district which is the Drayton valley, Breton area for years,” Says Volkman

Superintendent Brad Volkman sounded hopeful that the company looking to take over will want to keep all employees from drivers to administration working.

“Right now we don’t think we’re going to be really losing anybody, I think everybody will probably be working, now there may be some that have less hours but we’re trying to look after everybody” Volkman said