Catch-22 in School Transport Policy – Loughnavalley to Kilbeggan route

Open letter to Minister for Education Hildegarde Naughton, TD, and Michael Moynihan, TD, Minister of State at the Dept of Education with responsibility for Special Education and Inclusion

Dear Ministers,

Once again I want to draw your direct attention to an administrative Catch-22 in the Bus Éireann School Transport Scheme that urgently requires political intervention.

We are informed that transport eligibility is strictly tied to attending the nearest school, yet, when a family cannot secure a place at their nearest school due to lack of capacity, they are forced to look further afield – in our case, Mercy Secondary School in Kilbeggan, a feeder school for our village primary school.

Despite the Kilbeggan school bus stopping just 500 metres from our home in Loughnavalley, our children are categorised as concessionary and left without seats simply because of a rule that fails to account for school admissions reality and the inability of Bus Éireann to calculate school transport capacity requirements at a local level.

As you may already know, Bus Éireann are under no obligation to fulfil concessionary tickets.

Expecting parents to send children to a school with no places in order to qualify for a bus ticket is an absurdity.

I respectfully ask that you step in to apply common-sense flexibility to this well known (historical) issue, instructing Bus Éireann to immediately accommodate children affected by nearest-school capacity shortages.

Yours sincerely,

Stephen Bennett

Loughanavalley.