Elementary and high school students in the La Ronge area are having to find their own way to school this week.
The Northern Lights School Division suspended its busing contract with Allinone Conveyance Ltd. on Saturday and the contract was terminated Monday.
The contract termination affects students attending Gordon Denny and Pre-Cam elementary schools and Churchill High School.
The school division has given no official reason why the contract has been cancelled other than a message on its Facebook page that it is now in the process of finding another provider.
When contacted for an interview, Northern Lights School Division Director of Education Jason Young declined comment.
Katherine Lowenberg is the operations manager for Allinone.
She says they are a new company and there were some administrative hiccups in the beginning but nothing that couldn’t have been worked through.
“I honestly believe we weren’t given a fair chance,” Lowenberg says. “I know and I will take responsibility for the fact things didn’t go perfectly. There were situations where we were definitely in the wrong but we dealt with them as proficiently as we could and as quickly as we could.”
Lowenberg says they were not awarded the contract until July so there was some scrambling around trying to get ready for the school year.
One of the problems was overcrowding of student riders on some routes.
She says the reason this happened was because Allinone was not given accurate student lists of different areas from NLSD, so students that should have been walking to school were boarding buses.
The problem was then made worse by some parents following buses around on their routes.
“We had parents and individuals following the school buses and actually taking videos and pictures of what they could capture,” she says.
Allinone signed a roughly $6 million dollar contract this summer to provide busing to Northern Lights schools in La Ronge over the next five years.
Lowenberg says their bid was 30 per cent lower than the tender the previous long-term bus provider put in and this has created some harsh feelings in the small community which she believes has played a large part in the school division’s cancellation of the company’s contract.
In spite of it all, she says her father and company owner Larry Lowenberg had at one time provided local school bus service in La Ronge and they remain confident they could provide the service if given the opportunity.
(PHOTO: Northern Lights School Division building in La Ronge. Photo courtesy of Northern Lights School Division Facebook page)