Smaller buses and fewer routes helped the Chinook School Division come in under budget on their transportation side of things last school year.

The school division ran 13 fewer routes from the previous year and purchased 17 new buses to help them 'right size' their fleet.

Chinook School Division Chief Financial Officer Rod Quintin said the changes shaved down their total cost.

"For the most part it was two things, one we rationalized the routes so there are less of them," he explained. "We changed the size of the bus on the routes so it was more closely aligned to the amount of people that were required to be transported."

Going from 162 routes to 149 added an average of six minutes to bus rides to school for students.

"We had some feedback from parents who were in routes that we made longer because we were trying to consolidate," Quintin said. "We may have communities that used to have four bus routes, now have three, so you know that you have to make the routes longer to cover the territory around the catchment. It wasn't overwhelmingly negative, I wouldn't say it was all positive but it was an acceptable amount of feedback that we got."

They had budgeted just over $9.96 million for transportation in the 2017-18 school year and came in under by almost $292,000 or just shy of three per cent.

"We're definitely happier with our budget," he said. "We need to do something, we had to cut our costs somehow because we didn't have the resources available to us. It fell in line with our plan in terms of smaller buses, less consumption, less maintenance because they're newer, all of that fell in line with our plan."

The biggest savings for the school division in the transportation budget came on the operations side, underspending by $242,614.