Long term school bus solution needed

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As well as Mana Coach Services, representatives of the Ministry of Education, Wellington College and Wellington High School also attended the meeting, as did the Chair of the M kara/ riu Community Board, Mark Reed.

“I think it is quite a good outcome, at least in the short term,” Mr Reed says.

“But it doesn’t fix things in the long term,” he notes.

However those at the meeting had agreed to meet again “and I am cautiously optimistic” that a long-term solution will be found.

At the meeting there was “some acknowledgement that there was some absurdity in the policy, and an acknowledgment that the policy was quite rigid.”

The policy Mr Reed was referring to was one where students who are not attending their closest state or state-integrated school are not eligible for Ministry of Education-funded transport assistance.

The decision to allow all M ara secondary students to catch the bus at least until the end of the year also came after a media stand-up of M kara families on 29 June.

The stand-up, which the “Independent Herald” attended, was organised by Dr Scott Sheeran, the National Party candidate for Wellington Central in the upcoming election.

“I think your [“Independent Herald”] presence helped to sharpen the mind and led to the reversal,” Dr Sheeran says.

Almost everyone who spoke to the “Independent Herald” at the media stand-up described the decision to stop taking “ineligible” students as “crazy.”

“I’ve got a son who is to start college next year and he wants to go to Wellington College,” Robert Talarkiewicz said.

“All his friends are going to Wellington College and he selected that one as the better choice for him.

“I’ve got my fingers crossed,” Mr Talarkiewicz said, referring to the meeting the next day.

“It’s crazy that they have to go to a school that they don’t want to go to,” Nicola Waters said. Her sons go to Wellington College.

“If I had girls and they went to Wellington Girls they would be fine,” she said, adding that she is not in a position to “drop everything and pick [her sons] up.”

One of Hayden Radley’s sons goes to Wellington College and will be doing his first year of NCEA next year.

“I’m not going to have him change schools in his NCEA year.

“Our youngest son is going to college next year and he wants to go to Wellington College because that’s where his brother is going.

Mr Bradley also noted that the bus was never full, even though it was taking “ineligible students”. It had 14 at the most out of 20 seats on the bus, he said.

“Moving forward my daughter will be picked up but my son won’t,” Jerry Grafton said.

Jen Ward has three sons who all want to study at Wellington College. One is about to start college next year and wants to go to the same school as his brothers.

Because of her and her husband’s commitments, they cannot provide transport themselves.

“They complain about truancy. They should be doing everything they can to support [the students],” she says.

“I go to Wellington High School,” Charlotte Dickson says. “I take sociology at school… and I am doing social action.

“I’m ineligible because I am a girl going to a co-ed school,” she says, adding that her sister goes to Wellington Girls College, so is eligible to catch the bus.

“The policy is outdated,” Charlotte adds.

“Charlotte is going to have to wait in Karori for an hour and a half,” her mother says.

“It’s a safety issue.

“The biggest frustration is a policy that is gender-based and we are worried how long it has been since it has been reviewed.”

The Ministry of Education needs to recognise that “special character can be other things than just the schools being religious,” Genieve Morrison said.

“If there is a bus going anyway it seems crazy to exclude a few kids from catching it because of zoning issues.”

Although the secondary students who are not “eligible” have a reprieve this year, another issue relating to the M ara school bus looks likely to be about to surface, Mr Reed says.

Currently the bus transports students from Karori to M kara Model School and he has heard that the eligibility rules may soon be applied to them.

Wellington

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We’re a resilient lot here in Ōhāriu. Because we’re largely a hilly electorate, our roads are inevitably winding and narrow, and small slips and roadworks can interrupt traffic flow. Many cars park on streets, narrowing the roads further, and double decker buses meander around some pretty challenging routes But it all seems to work, and a shared understanding of unspoken rules, sprinkled with a good dose of courtesy, generally makes it all work. We make room for each other.

Ukraine war.

I recently hosted a meeting which included local property developers and representatives from the City and Regional Councils. The background for the meeting was the need to ensure all people involved in providing more housing in our electorate, whether it be those building them or those regulating and permitting that building, understand the issues which govern the ability to build the houses everyone agrees we need.

There are essentially two types of development; greenfields and brownfields. Greenfields means building on currently undeveloped land, typically ex farmland on the edges of current urban areas, where infrastructure like sewers, water supply and other essential services don’t exist are usually built by the developer.

Brownfields development means rebuilding on existing sites, and there has been considerable discussion in recent times around how much intensification should be allowed in existing suburbs, especially changing of height limits to allow for more apartments.

Both have their advantages and disadvantages; the Regional Council in particular see their role to prevent more

Users of the Ngaio Gorge deserve the biggest accolades. For almost six years the stabilisation work has reduced the road to one lane, with periodic closure necessary. But people put up with it, virtually with no complaint, and now it’s back to a two-way road. More generally we’ve been disrupted by COVID, world-wide inflation and shortages of goods, and fuel price hikes caused by the runoff and other material ending up in our harbours, especially the Porirua harbour in the case of development north of Johnsonville and Newlands. The Wellington City Council are concerned that the existing infrastructure cannot handle the pressure it comes under when new housing areas are developed. Existing infrastructure is aging and needs upgrading across our city, as evidenced by recent pipe failures. An advantage of intensification of existing areas means more people, therefore more ratepayers to pay for those upgrades.

But we get on with it. And how I know locals are resilient and decent? Because when I take my challenging and sometimes intrusive intellectually disabled son out in the electorate, where his behaviour can really invade people’s space, they invariably tolerate his behaviour, and often end up apologising to me for his behaviour!

He brings out the good in people, and gives me faith that despite the negativity raining down on us, politically and media wise, Ōhāriu folk are good resilient folk just getting on with it.

Developers of course need to make a profit, and wish to keep their compliance costs as low as possible. Many believe the Resource Management Act is too cumbersome. We as government for our part have undertaken to rewrite that act.

The feedback was good, but the success will be when there are sufficient affordable houses to meetdemand. That is certainly my goal as your MP.

That, and of course having a vibrant and functioning Johnsonville Shopping Centre we can all be proud of.

There’s plenty to be getting on with.

There’s plenty of change happening in our education, health, infrastructure, and environment sector. Its disconcerting, but all being done for the right reason, and we’ll see that in time to come. We will need to apply the same understanding to the changes as we do when navigating Ōhāriu roads.