Windsor school boards ask council to pause cancelling school extras, consider alternatives

Administrators at Windsor's largest school boards want city council to stop a plan to eliminate and redeploy Transit Windsor buses that high school students pay for to get to school.

These buses are called school extras, and run special routes that only high school students can pay to ride to school and back home. 

In the proposed 2025 budget is a plan that would eliminate these specific routes and redeploy the buses across the system. 

The changes, according to the budget document, would extend existing routes to replace the school extras and increase frequency on other routes in the city. 

LISTEN: School board directors elaborate on letter protesting loss of extra transit routes serving Windsor high schools

Parents, students and school board administrators at the Greater Essex County District School Board and the Windsor Essex Catholic District School Board have criticized the decision. 

"Put it on pause until we've had further dialogue to see if we can come up with some possible solutions for our students that would benefit their budget pressures," said Emelda Byrne, director of education for the WECDSB. 

Both Byrne and Vicki Houston, director of education for the GECDSB, said they found out about the plan through media reports. 

"There hasn't been, in my opinion, a very thorough consultation process," said Houston. 

City council will meet next Monday, Jan. 27, to debate Mayor Drew Dilkens's proposed budget, which needs to be approved before Feb. 3.

The buses run to Vincent Massey, Holy Names, Riverside and St. Joseph's Catholic high schools and are used by 650 students daily, according to the school boards. 

In the proposed budget, Transit Windsor would eliminate these buses and increase service on other public routes in the city:

Budget documents say nine buses, or between eight and 10 per cent of the city's usable fleet, are entirely dedicated to these routes, and can't be used elsewhere during the day because of logistics. 

A similar plan was first proposed by Couns. Fabio Costante and Kieran McKenzie, both of whom sit on Transit Windsor's board of directors, during last year's budget process.