The City of New Westminster is contributing funds toward a bus service for students attending the new Fraser River Middle School.
Despite some concerns about providing money to transport kids to school, council approved a one-time grant of $5,000 to help parents pay for a private bus service for Fraser River Middle School for the 2016/17 school year. The funds will come out of the city’s special projects fund.
While it’s not a huge financial burden for the city to contribute $5,000 toward the service, Coun. Mary Trentadue said transporting children to school isn’t the city’s role.
The school’s apparent advisory council requested that the city continuing partial funding toward a private bus service that parents are organization to get their gets to and from school. Students from Qayqayt, Lord Kelvin, Lord Tweedsmuir and Connaught Heights elementary schools will be attending the new middle school on the former John Robson Elementary School site.
Coun. Patrick Johnstone said the city has a responsibility in getting kids to school safely and does that by building safe roads, sidewalks and crosswalks and by creating safe routes to school programs. He considers the funding to be “seed funding” that will help parents establish a bus service for the middle school students.
Coun. Chuck Puchmayr supported the grant, but said it wouldn’t be necessary if the middle school’s location hadn’t been “a political football” during an election campaign. Instead of the site at Eighth Street and Royal Avenue, a middle school had once been proposed on a small section of Grimston Park.
“We look back now and think, wow, if we had a middle school there, none of this would be an issue. The kids would be in really close proximity to a school in the central west end,” he said. “Unfortunately that didn’t happen and now we have this.”
Mayor Jonathan Cote supported the grant for a pilot project as a means of helping parents get the bus service off the ground and see if there is a community demand for the service.
