Fury at school bus cancellation | Hawkes Bay News | Local News in Hawkes Bay

More than 20 Hawke's Bay secondary school students struggled to start school this year because the Ministry of Education cancelled their rural bus route.

Hastings Girls' High School, Hastings Boys' High School and Karamu High School students from rural areas such as Taihape, Pukehamoamoa, Crownthorpe, and Fernhill - some as far as 70km away - have always taken the bus from Pukehamoamoa School to Hastings.

This year, the route that has been operating since the 1970s was cancelled because the Ministry of Education said students needed to attend the closest school, Flaxmere College.

Ministry of Education Resourcing Group manager John Clark said a review of the service in 2010 revealed only six Flaxmere College students using the bus.

Guidelines stipulated there must be at least eight students attending the closest school to make a bus route eligible, he said.

The cancellation occurred despite extensive campaigning by the local community on grounds of financial and time burdens caused by personal transport.

Community spokesperson Sharon McRae said the service was never free and parents were happy to pay compared to the hour-long round trips they now faced.

"The ministry has taken funding away from our bus because we have chosen to go to schools other than Flaxmere College," she said. "We should at least be able to get to Flaxmere College whether we are going there or not.

"The injustice of it is the fact that there are buses taking Flaxmere kids to the schools that our kids go to and for us to see that, to see all these kids who live in Flaxmere that chose other schools and they have a bus, but we don't even get a bus that far."

Pukehamoamoa School principal Brendon White said it was tradition for his students to attend the Hastings' schools.

"If I go back through our records here we have had no children living in our area go to Flaxmere College in the whole time the school has been open, so we have quite strong historical ties to Hastings Boys' and Hastings Girls'."

Mr Clark said concerns were taken into consideration, but school preference was not a good enough reason to keep the route operating.

"The choice of parents to send their children to a single-sex school, bypassing an existing co-ed school, is not grounds for a ministry-contracted school bus service," he said. "As the ultimate responsibility to ensure that children attend school it is the caregivers who will now need to make alternative arrangements."

Mr White believed the Government had a responsibility to provide transport to students.