Despite a reported, 2 million dollar shortfall, the Chinook School Division Transportation department is holding down the fort.

That's according to a recent presentation by Kevin Jones, Manager of Transportation, Maintenance and Facilities.

He doesn't sugar-coat the challenges faced in the last year, mixed equally between storms, COVID-19, and staff shortages. And he warns that some problems, such as the cost of buses and fuel, will continue to pose challenges in the next couple of years. But despite those setbacks, the department managed to continue to make it work, even as new shortages look to complicate things.

"Every year we strive to replace ten to twelve buses. And we've just finished up here at the end of June our five-year contract with Legacy Bus. So this year we're planning to on going back to the marketplace to see what different vendors can provide for us."

With the average age of each bus sitting at around seven years, and over 150 routes to manage, replacing those buses in a timely manner becomes critical to getting children to school safely. So as COVID and various shortages stretch the wait times for new buses to a year or more, Jones says that they have looked into perhaps extending the life of what they've got.

"We're probably looking anywhere from 8 to 12 months from the time we place an order to the time for them to get on the line and get it completed and to get them to us. So we're hopeful that if we have a tender out here in the next number of weeks, we can see the buses for the fall of '22"

But with those shortages come cost increases. With bus prices already rising dramatically (A 29 passenger bus that cost $55,000 in 2012 costs roughly $75,000 today while a 53 passenger unit jumped from $76,000 to $107,000), Jones says that they expect another 5 to 10 percent increase in both bus prices and fuel prices in the next couple of years. Meaning that the 2 million dollar shortfall in funding isn't going anywhere, at least in the short term, and it has them looking at potential alternatives.

Jones added that they will typically get between 300,000 to 350,000 kilometres on a unit before retiring them or moving them temporarily into what is called their "spare fleet", but that if push comes to shove and the shortages last too long, they can potentially keep some of those more gently-used units on the road a bit longer.

74 units have been replaced over the past five years, meaning that the current fleet is all within 10 years of age, with the average route stretching about 209 kilometres per day. They currently have 153 buses split between 116 rural routes, 33 urban and 1 contracted route.

The challenges, according to Jones, is much to do with driver recruitment. HR shortages for spare drivers and casual drivers, especially in rural areas. The School Division has held a number of job fairs to bolster those numbers with some success, though it continues to be a challenge.

Of the 636 driver days lost in the report, 190 were reportedly due to lack of personnel, while 10 were mechanical and the rest presumably were due to the multi-day storms of late 2020 and early 2021 that halted bus service for multiple days at a stretch; most memorably the November 9-13 week of the Municipal Election and the January 13-14 storm that followed it a couple of months later, as well as the February 9-12 Polar Vortex that caused temperatures to plummet far below safe levels.