By Samantha Walker
Families may be dropping their kids off in the dark of winter if a proposed school bus route connecting Mernda to Diamond Valley College becomes permanent.
A new Public Transport Victoria bus is due to replace the charter bus that ran through the area until the end of the last school year, with the new service starting on January 28.
A potential route for the new bus was released, but parents were told the route may still change after negotiations with the bus company.
A Mernda mother, whose daughter attends Diamond Valley College and who asked not to be named, said her child would have to be at the new bus stop two kilometres away by 7.15am.
“The bus won’t come through Mernda village at all and it’ll be an hour earlier, so the kids will have to get up an hour earlier,” she said.
“I also have a younger child, so do I have to get that young child up, do I have to get him in the car, or can I leave him at home for the five to 10 minutes it will take me to go down there and come back?”
The mother said about 15 students in her daughter’s year level alone also lived in the Mernda area affected by bus route changes.
Sixty-one students used the charter bus service last year en route from South Morang to the college.
The introduction of the new route, which will use myki ticketing, follows the announcement of capped annual fares of $480 on school buses operating under the government’s School Bus Program.
Under the old ticketing system, parents whose children didn’t attend their closest government school paid a bus fare based on the distance to the school they attended – in some cases as much as $1240 a year.
The new PTV-run bus will require parents to pay a myki fare of $526.50 a year for each child, instead of up to $1240 a year per child under the old system.
One mother from Mernda said that although the new PTV bus would be cheaper for her child to use than the one she paid for last year, the new route would be inconvenient.
“It’s still definitely cheaper, but it’s a public bus and it’s not coming through the estate,” she said.
A spokesman for the Victorian government said the charter bus service was “only ever intended as a short-term measure”.
“Parents will be informed of the changes in late January ahead of school returning,” he said.
“The charter bus may run alongside the new PTV service at the start of the year to ensure no kids miss out on getting to school.”
