IT IS STILL unclear to many families whether their children will have a bus to school this year.

With most schools back last week, parents have been scrambling to arrange alternative transport and battling Bus Éireann for information. Bus Éireann operates the School Transport Scheme on behalf of the Department of Education.

The service, which is experiencing extreme driver shortages, has been accused of making the process highly stressful and confusing for families, many of whom have already paid for a seat on a bus they don’t have access to.

One parent told The Journal that he had applied and paid for a place on the school bus for his child at the end of last year, as he was “anticipating issues”.

Despite this, he was informed on Friday that his son would not have a place, and has received no indication of whether this will change.

“My wife had to drive my son to school this morning as it’s over 20km away, and she’ll have to collect him at finish time,” he said.

“We’ve had no update since so we must assume this will be for the foreseeable.”

Another parent said she’d been told there would be a bus, but when she arrived at the stop with her child and waited, it never showed up.

After she tweeted about the incident, Bus Éireann sent her an email apologising for the inconvenience, advising that “a solution has not yet been sourced”. 

The Department of Education has established an Exceptional No Service Interim Grant to help cover the cost of private transport while families are in limbo.

Payments will not be made until the service has resumed as normal and the total number of days children went without a bus can be calculated.

There is now a customer service line dedicated to school transport queries.

Communication issues

Another parent said that she was able to get her child on a bus by the middle of their first week back. however, she accused Bus Éireann of making the process “unnecessarily stressful”.

“I had to contact other mothers and compare codes and guess where the bus left from and the time,” she explained.

“Most people missed it on the first day. An email finally arrived on the Tuesday just after 10:30am with the information. By that stage we had it all sorted ourselves.”

She described it as a “really poor experience” due to the lack of a direct channel of communication with the coordinators of the school bus scheme.

None of it made sense.

“It seems that they made something they knew about for months unnecessarily stressful and really it doesn’t make sense that they cannot have an organised approach to something they do annually.”

In a statement to The Journal today, a spokesperson for Bus Éireann said: “Unfortunately, difficulties have arisen in specific locations with a small number of contracted services, where contractors have advised us that it has not yet been possible to provide vehicles/drivers in time for the start of the school year.  

“This is against a back drop of driver shortages being experienced in many sectors of the economy throughout the country.

“Recruitment is continuing and the situation is dynamic with solutions being found on a daily basis.”

They also apologised to families, saying those affected will be contacted directly by Bus Éireann once a solution is found.

“Deeply infuriating”

Speaking to The Journal, Wicklow TD Jennifer Whitmore said that there are often issues with school buses locally, “but it’s particularly pronounced this year”.

“The big issue is the late notice … to be emailing parents on a Friday afternoon that the bus will not be available for their children on Monday,” she said.

According to Whitmore, the whole school transport system needs reform and the upper age limit for bus drivers, which is currently 70, should be extended to help tackle the driver shortage.

Independent TD for Laois Offaly Carol Nolan said it was “frankly ludicrous for parents to have deal with this issue yet again despite the clear need for the Scheme to be demand led”.

“At this point, the entire process is just farcical, and for many parents, deeply infuriating and upsetting,” Nolan said. 

“We all accept that the decision last year to waive the average fee of €500 was a welcome move that saved families money in time of increasing financial pressure.”

“However, it should have been possible then, and even more so now, to foresee that making the service free was going to increase the numbers of those applying and that this would then require timely and advance actions to ensure greater numbers of buses were made available.

“This has not happened and as a result, families in both Offaly and Laois are now under incredible strain as they scramble to try and source transport for their children.”