The Saskatchewan Rivers School Division’s transportation accountability report shows that the division had a great year for weather cancellations due to the timing of storms.
The Sask. Rivers board got a look at the report during their regular meeting on Monday. It shows the division cancelled 545 routes until June 8 as a total for the year, this is significantly lower than the 905 cancelled until June 8, 2025.
Director of education Neil Finch said that transportation is going well despite the regular challenges in the file. The biggest is finding enough drivers
“(Manager of Transportation Services) Ryan Bruce and his team do a phenomenal job of recruitment, and our HR department that helps out with that,” Finch said.
“Finding bus drivers has been a difficult thing for school divisions for a number of years and it continues to be one of our highest risks … but because of the work we do on the recruitment side and also on the job satisfaction side, we’re able to fill our bus routes on a regular basis.”
The division has consistently had all routes filled since 2023 but the report says a challenge on the horizon is substitute drivers. The division has no unfilled routes, but there were 54.5 routes cancelled due to no substitute driver over the school year.
The report included data up until June 8, 2026 and past data dating back to 2023.
Weather was the biggest cause of cancellations with 250.5 days until June 8. There were also 5.5 days cancelled due to mechanical issues.
The total number of weather cancellations for the year was 448, for mechanical it was 21.5 and for no substitute driver was 54.5.
Finch said that the major storms hitting on breaks throughout the year including the March break was beneficial.
“With the winter that we had, the amount of snow that we had, and the moisture we had this spring, it’s been impressive that we actually had less cancellations this year than we have the last number of years,” Finch said. “Jerrold talked about this. We got lucky a little bit with some of the storms happening during breaks when students weren’t in school. But we also had bus drivers that were quite creative that spring when it was flooding to get to students that we could get to.”
There was also a new category for cancellations called Flood/Fire which categorized cancellations caused by the flooding and fires in rural areas in May. This category saw 21 route cancellations.
In 2022, the board requested more depth and greater detail from the transportation report. Each division in Saskatchewan receives this report from the Ministry of Education four times a year to see how the division’s buses, drivers and mechanics are doing. Chief Financial Officer Jerry Pidborochynski gave the report, which is done semi-annually in the division.
The number of students transported has decreased slightly from the previous report in 2025. In 2025-2026 there were 3,206 students transported compared to 3,268 in 2025.
The average age of the bus fleet has decreased from 9.1 years in 2025 to 8.75 years in 2026. There are currently 102 transportation routes with 24 contracted out.
Bus passes purchased at a discount rate due to a partnership with the City of Prince Albert to transport in city high school students decreased slightly from 2,141 in 2025 to 2,107 in 2026.
The average urban one-way bus ride is 15 minutes while the average rural bus ride one way is 26 minutes. The longest urban one-way bus ride is 45 minutes and the longest rural one-way bus ride is 80 minutes, which used to be 90 minutes in the previous report.
michael.oleksyn@paherald.sk.ca
