ACT Wants Empty School Bus Seats Open to Any Rural Child Who Needs One

The ACT Party has proposed letting any rural child board a passing school bus when there are empty seats, a change MP Andrew Hoggard says would stop families from running second transport systems alongside ones already paid for by taxpayers.

Under existing Ministry of Education rules, students qualify for free school bus transport only if they attend the nearest school they can enrol at and live more than 3.2 kilometres from their primary or intermediate or more than 4.8 kilometres from their high school. Hoggard told RNZ the settings were out of step with rural reality, where families chose schools for all sorts of reasons beyond geographic proximity.

“The bus is already running. The seat is already paid for. Let the kid on. We should be using what we’ve already got, not making families pay taxes for a bus that leaves their kid stranded,” Hoggard said. “Fuel isn’t cheap, time isn’t free, and rural families have better things to be doing than running a second transport system because of a Wellington rulebook.”

If routes filled and additional buses were needed, Hoggard said the Education Ministry could fund them out of its existing budget. “It doesn’t need another review or working group. It just needs a bit of common sense,” he said. “We want diesel in tractors, not wasted on school runs that shouldn’t be needed.”

The proposal lands in the middle of growing rural frustration over the way the ministry has redrawn school bus routes. In Patoka, in inland Hawke’s Bay, farmer and veterinarian Sally Newall says her nine-year-old son Ted, who has epilepsy and other medical needs, lost his stop at the start of this year after eligible student numbers in the area dropped below the required threshold.

The nearest bus stop is now about three kilometres from the family home, along a high-speed rural road with blind bends and frequent heavy traffic. Newall says it is not safe for Ted to travel that distance independently, and her application for Specialised School Transport Assistance, known as SESTA, was declined.

“Instead, they’ve given us an allowance per school day to contribute to the fuel costs of getting him to school, which isn’t really the issue,” Newall told RNZ. “If we lived in town, he would be provided with a method of transport to get him safely to and from school, but because of where we live, rurally, I feel like we are discriminated against by the ministry.”

Newall said her son’s bus, run by Tranzit, still passed within reasonable distance of her property. All she had asked was that it travel the additional three kilometres, as it had done in previous years. The family was not seeking a new dedicated van or a new route, only the restoration of a stop the bus used to make.

Ministry of Education school transport group manager James Meffan said the SESTA system and the regular school bus network operated as separate programmes. “The presence of a school bus has no influence on whether a SESTA vehicle service is available,” he said. SESTA eligibility depended on the number of qualifying students in an area and whether a provider was contracted to deliver the service. There was currently no SESTA contractor in Patoka.

Meffan said where a SESTA vehicle service was not available, families could apply for an allowance toward fuel and travel costs. The ministry’s three Patoka School bus routes had been reviewed last year as part of a wider reassessment of Napier-area services, with route changes following shifts in eligible student numbers. Bus operators were free to make private extensions to routes outside ministry funding, but families would have to negotiate the cost themselves.

The Patoka case is one of several that have driven concern about how the rules treat rural communities. Earlier this year the ministry paused a wider review of school bus eligibility after backlash from parents in Palmerston North and elsewhere whose children had lost their seats. Some parents told reporters their fuel bills tripled when their children were declared ineligible.

Hoggard’s pitch is partly about cost and partly about flexibility. The “nearest school” rule was designed to ration capacity, with each route oriented to the closest local school, but in rural areas those schools are often well away from the farms whose owners and workers are paying for the bus through their taxes. ACT argues that opening empty seats to any rural child whose family wants their kid on the bus would lower the household burden without requiring fresh capital investment, since most existing routes carry available space.

The political mechanics may matter as much as the policy. Education Minister Erica Stanford has spent recent months consumed by curriculum reform and her contested immigration bill, and the school transport file has remained inside her ministry rather than rising to cabinet. ACT will likely raise the rule change through coalition policy discussions, where the smaller parties have been pushing harder for rural concessions as the cost of living squeeze deepens.

For families like the Newalls, however, even a rule change would arrive too late for this year. Newall said her concern was not the cents per litre of fuel, it was watching her son try to walk a country road that was never built for primary school children to walk on alone.

What do you think? Should empty seats on rural school buses be open to any child whose parents want them on, or do the current eligibility rules exist for a reason? Tell us in the comments below.