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Parents object to their kids riding transit to shop class

By: Nick Martin

Posted: 12/8/2008 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

Grade 7 students from Shamrock School board Winnipeg Transit bus to attend shop class at Glenlawn Collegiate. (RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS)

SOME parents at Shamrock School in Southdale are demanding that Louis Riel School Division provide a school bus to take their kids to and from shop classes at Glenlawn Collegiate.

Each child in grades 7 and 8 goes by Winnipeg Transit to Glenlawn one afternoon every six school days. The families pay for the tickets.

"Why is the Louis Riel School Division not providing bus service to their students? A child's safety is the school's responsibility during school hours. They are unchaperoned. Mind-boggling as a parent...," said Shamrock parent Gabrielle Head.

She said 18 families have banded together and are organizing more families to protest to the division.

"They love the program -- we have no issues with the program," she stressed.

Head said the division says putting the kids on a transit bus is itself a learning experience that will teach them "tools of resilience."

Her husband, Lionel Head, added, "When my kids go to school, I expect them to be safely looked after until I get them back."

The parents say it is not safe for their children to travel unsupervised. Bus schedules are tight, and kids can get left behind at Shamrock or Glenlawn, they say. One father says the kids can simply skip shop and take the bus downtown, where anything could happen.

The parents say that when their children, some still 11 years old, leave Glenlawn, they have to cross Fermor Avenue by tunnel to catch their bus on the south side. The parents say older students hang around that tunnel smoking, and one child has had a cap stolen.

"It's unsupervised -- there's no adult with them," said parent Sharon Shewchuk. "They're compromising safety over the cost of a bus ride."

Louis Riel superintendent Terry Borys said he's heard from only five families at Shamrock, and no one has made a formal request to trustees for a school bus.

The division has 32 schools with middle-years grades, but only three have their own shops, Borys said. There has been no complaint from any of the other 28 schools that sendstudents to high schools by transit.

It was only last year that the division finally met student and parent demand and extended middle-years practical arts and human ecology to schools in the former St. Boniface School Division, he said. Shop had been compulsory in the former St. Vital School Division before the 2002 amalgamation into Louis Riel.

Borys said the Shamrock kids have a 17-minute direct bus ride between Shamrock and Glenlawn. Last year, children at Shamrock and Island Lakes Community School went to Victor Wyatt School for shop, but that required transferring to a second bus. The closest high school, J.H. Bruns Collegiate, can't work middle-years students into its shops timetable.

"We are not funded (by the province) to bus kids to these schools," said Borys. Transit has adjusted bus schedules to accommodate students, high school staff keep an eye on the younger kids, and there is an adult supervisor to see them through the tunnel at Glenlawn, he said.

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 8, 2008 A5

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