Sudbury Student Services Consortium executive director Renée Boucher said cancelling school buses due to inclement weather is never something she takes lightly.
Given there have been three days of school bus cancellations due to snow and extreme cold affecting Greater Sudbury in the past week alone — causing school exams to be postponed — Sudbury.com was curious if there were more snow days this year than in previous. So we thought we'd speak to Boucher.
So far this school year, the Sudbury Student Services Consortium has already cancelled school buses in Greater Sudbury six times — on Nov. 27, Dec. 21, Jan. 8, Jan. 24, Jan. 28 and Jan. 29.
The consortium also cancelled school buses on just Manitoulin Island Jan. 25, for a total of seven school bus cancellations in the area it services so far this school year.
Over the past seven years, the consortium's most school bus cancellations was 10 in 2012-2013.
However, only eight of those cancellations in 2012-2013 actually affected Greater Sudbury. There were also eight days of school bus cancellations that affected Greater Sudbury in the last school year, 2017-2018.
There were six days of school bus cancellations affecting Greater Sudbury in 2016-2017, four in 2015-2016, three in both 2011-2012 and 2013-2014 and just one in 2014-2015.
Boucher said the six school bus operators that provide transportation for the Sudbury bus consortium in Greater Sudbury, Espanola, Massey and Manitoulin Island are on the road as early at 2:30 a.m., reporting on road conditions.
Taking into account the advice from the bus operators, Boucher and her staff make the call about school bus cancellations at around 5 or 5:30 a.m.
She said the consortium often gets a lot of flak from parents when school buses are cancelled.
“It's not something we want to do,” Boucher said. “We want to offer the service to all of our parents all the time.
“But we need the road to be safe for the children we carry. A lot of parents don't understand. They call us and tell us we live in Northern Ontario, and years back, we didn't have so many snow days.”
Boucher said budgetary cutbacks to snow clearing have played a role, as have the modern design of school buses.
They're more fuel efficient than older models, but the fuel gels at a warmer temperature — at -32 C or -33 C, as opposed to -35 C — causing the vehicles to break down or fail to start altogether in the extreme cold.
Check out this story we wrote in 2014 on the topic of fuel-efficient, but cold-sensitive school buses.
Boucher said she remembers only too well the year of 10 days of school bus cancellations.
“We had a lot of freezing rain (in 2012-2013),” she said. “It seems that we're getting extremes. We're either getting freezing rain, rain on top of snow, or we're getting a lot of snow or super cold weather.
“I know I'm not the only one, because I speak to my colleagues across the province, and everybody in the same boat. The extremes are really affecting all of us across the province.”
