While children are enjoying the final days of summer, recent cutbacks and changes in Regina Public Schools have many parents fretting the fall’s arrival.
One of those changes is cancelled bus service for residents living within a one-kilometre radius of their school.
For day care operator and parent Charmaine Bjorklund, it means walking 32 minutes to school and back with her day care kids twice a day.
“I’ve got kindergarten kids that will be going to school this year, and they can’t walk that in the winter,” Bjorklund said, adding that the changes will also impact her daycare business.
“It has kind of limited me to not taking infants or even toddlers anymore because of the fact that it’s just not safe for them to be walking in the middle of winter,” she said.
Bjorklund says it will also take a lot of time away from doing activities with the kids.
“(We’re) having to go and pick them up instead of doing more crafts and story time and stuff like that, so it really cuts down on the activities we get to do every day.”
Other parents in the neighbourhood are also sharing the same worry.
- What is a halal mortgage? How interest-free home financing works in Canada
- Capital gains changes are ‘really fair,’ Freeland says, as doctors cry foul
- Ontario doctors offer solutions to help address shortage of family physicians
- Canada will take bigger economic hit than U.S. if Trump wins election: report
“I was mad, we were told that because the school across the street was torn down we would qualify to a school outside of our area, and we live a kilometre and a half walking distance (from the school) but they said we’re still cut,” Regina parent Anita Chartier said.
Parents with children who don’t use the bus service, now have to pay for lunchtime supervision.
“There’s no way that they would be able to walk and then eat in five to ten minutes and then walk back. So yeah, we’ll have to pay for the lunch program,” Chartier said.
The cost of lunch time supervision is $100 a year per child, to a maximum of $200. The school division says it works out to approximately 51 cents a day. They also say there are resources for families to use if they can’t afford lunch supervision.
“It’s unfortunate that the students no longer eligible for transportation must pay for that,” Regina Public Schools Supervisor of Communications Terry Lazarou said.
“But it’s an equity thing, all other students in our school division are similarly paying.”
The changes are the result of a $9.5 million funding shortfall from the provincial government. The Regina Public School Division says they opted to emphasize classroom resources, so when it came to saving money, officials looked outside the classroom. The cutbacks to bus service are expected to net approximately $1.3 million.
“We’re very sorry to the parents that have had this upheaval in their regular routines, it’s unfortunate that the changes to the funding model and the increased costs that we’re facing have impacted them,” Lazarou said. “But again, there are many, many other students who have been paying the noon hour supervision costs since they started school.”
While parents say they understand the need to save funds, they want to be met halfway.
“I called the school board, and they told me to talk to the Ministry, I called the ministry, and they told me no, it was the school boards problem,” Bjorklund said. “So it’s been a runaround.”
“A lot of us parents were calling, emailing, writing whoever we could possibly email,” Chartier said. “We’re all getting the same generic responses, the same copy and paste emails from everybody.”
Comments