Education Minister says onus is on school boards to fix bus driver shortage, hot classrooms

Toronto: Ontario’s education minister Mitzie Hunter said Friday it’s up to school boards to fix the dual problems of bus driver shortages and the lack of air conditioning in schools in hot days.
School boards in York Region, Toronto and Hamilton-Wentworth have said that bus driver shortages have left as many as 1,000 children in each region getting to and from school late, or not at all over the past week.
“There seems to be a coordination challenge that’s causing this issue and we’re monitoring that very closely.”

The bus companies say they’re having trouble attracting drivers, who may have left the industry altogether to drive for Uber.
Union leaders say wages of between $60-$65 for a four hour shift haven’t increased in years, and there is constant turnover in which companies are contracted by boards to ferry students.
“The role that the province has of course is to provide the funding to the school boards for transportation and we’ve increased that funding by 40 per cent (since 2003),” Hunter said. “And in terms of coordinating those services across school boards, that’s something that boards do with the consortium of bus providers.”
The Toronto District School Board says the majority of its schools do not have full air conditioning coverage, and some have no air conditioning at all. Parents as well as the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario have complained that children cannot concentrate in hot classrooms. Toronto was under a heat warning for several days this week.
In Toronto, the board says many older schools cannot be retrofitted with air conditioning even if money was made available to do so, because their electrical grids couldn’t handle the increased load.
On the issue of students in many schools dealing with hot temperatures this week without air conditioning, Hunter said schools across Ontario were given a total of $1.1 billion to conduct repairs and upgrades this summer.
“No school will put children at risk in terms of heat and I know that is not something that is going to happen.”
She also said that “weather patterns are changing” and we have to “monitor those extreme days as much as possible.”