Robert Fisher
Staff Reporter
BARRY’S BAY – Two weeks into the new school year and there appears to be no resolution in sight in the dispute between school bus operators and the Renfrew County Joint Transportation Consortium (RCJTC); the group that contracts busing services for the Renfrew County District School Board and the Renfrew County Catholic District School Board.
Families are inconvenienced and having to come up with workarounds to get their children to and from school, altering work hours, trying to find carpools and, in one case, quitting a job because an employer wouldn’t accommodate the employee’s need to get her children to school.
Kerri Jessup-Burley lives in South Algonquin and, for her, the issue isn’t just busing but poor communication, also. “It wasn’t until three or four days before school that somebody in Whitney had put (on Facebook) about no buses.” The school board, she said, sent an email but she never received it. She verified the email address with her daughter’s school and checked her spam folder. The school told her another message was sent, which Burley didn’t receive either. “I’ve never gotten an email from the school board.”
Burley works 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and she can’t take the time to drive nearly an hour round-trip twice a day. Her husband is a truck driver and is gone much of the week.
Schools began implementing ‘blended learning’ after the first week. Students who have access to technology and decent internet can download class materials and assignments. “Nobody’s teaching her,” Burley said. “Nobody’s teaching those lessons. They’re not teaching those lessons at all.”
There are virtual classroom options available with the Catholic board. Students who choose that option, where a teacher is teaching the lesson material, like during the pandemic, are locked in for the entire semester. If the buses start running again by, for example, Thanksgiving students who select the virtual classroom option can’t go back to in-person classes until the next semester after Christmas.
“The reason I’m frustrated,” she said, “is the response to us has always been, ‘we gave you over two weeks to make arrangements to get your child to school.’
“There’s a lot of parents in this area coming from Whitney and Madawaska. That’s a long drive. They can’t afford it.” The school board may have given two weeks notice to parents, “but they have known for a couple of months and they should have made accommodations for these kids, not getting them to school, but at least online somehow.”
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