Dubai: Indian mother Nora was terrified when she asked where her six-year-old daughter was and neither the bus driver nor the school knew.
Another mother, Sara, was worried something had happened to her five-year-old son who was not dropped home by the bus on time. Her son finally reached at 7pm.
In the first week of this academic session that started on August 30, several incidents of school buses getting lost for hours, buses not showing up at all in the morning and children being put on wrong buses have raised concerns of parents whose children go to a Dubai school.
There are a total of 4,000 school buses transporting 151,000 students from Dubai private schools daily and such problems can be common at the beginning of the academic year.
However, this can be scary for any parent following the horrific incident last year in Abu Dhabi where four-year-old Nizaha Ala’a died after being left behind in her school bus.
Parents whose children are enrolled at St Mary’s Catholic High School in Al Muhaisnah, which has a contract with the Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) to provide bus transport services for students, expressed their concerns after they experienced many problems in their children’s bus transportation at the beginning of the school year.
“My five-year-old son came home at 7pm,” said Sara (not her real name, all parents’ names have been changed as per their request), whose son was supposed to reach home in Al Karama at around 3pm.
“I understand that at the beginning of the school year such problems occur, but my issue is that the bus attendant switched off her phone, so I had no idea where my child was,” she said.
When Nora’s six-year-old daughter did not reach home on time, neither the bus driver nor the school knew where she was.
“The bus driver said my daughter was not on the bus and the school said my daughter was not in school. No one knew where she was. This is not acceptable. After panicking for hours I found that she was in the wrong bus and, instead of going to Al Riqqa, she was in Bur Dubai. It turned out the information on the tag was wrong.”
Nora also said the RTA phone applications, which allow parents to track their children and receive texts updating them on their children’s location did not work. “Even their emergency number was not working,” she said.
In the case of Filipino Maya, the bus never showed up in the first place to pick her son up.
“I had to leave my work in Dubai Marina to pick up my son and drop him to school in Al Muhaisnah. I think the RTA and the school should have studied their bus routine before school started to avoid these problems, she said.
In response to the parents’ concerns, Mouza Saeed Al Merri, Director, Marketing and Corporate Communications at RTA, said the start of each academic year witnesses some confusion due to the incomplete home location details of some students, coupled with heavy traffic concurrent with the return of residents and citizens from the summer vacations.
“The RTA is keen on following up on the observations received through a dedicated team which has taken immediate action in response to the observations received from parents and school managements about the delay of some buses. The RTA has figured out solutions for most of these observations and work is at hand to tackle some obstacles,” she said.
She also said more buses have been deployed to cut short the time of the trip back home and now each bus has a single trip on a specific route, ensuring the earliest arrival time of children. “RTA emphasises that students should hold ID cards showing their details along with the number of the specific bus that they travel on to avoid boarding a wrong bus,” she said.
The school, operated by St Mary’s Group of Schools, opened to over 700 students on August 30, and RTA is providing transport to over 600 students and teachers.
“During the first three days of operations, several families experienced problems with the transport service. During the morning, some buses were running late and some students were not picked up. In the afternoon, some students were left behind and some got on the wrong bus,” said Joseph E. Flynn, managing girector, St. Mary’s Group of Schools.
“The school coordinated closely with the parents involved to ensure that the children arrived safely to school in the morning and home in the afternoon. A number of meetings were held with RTA senior management and operations to ensure that the bus routing information was updated and streamlined,” he said.
The school said it improved its system of preparing and organising students to board the bus. By September 2, most of the bus routes were operating satisfactorily and RTA had activated its call centre for parent communications. They have committed to streamlining all their bus routes to optimise travel time by early next week. The school will continue to work closely with RTA to improve its own internal procedures and to ensure that parents and students receive a safe and high quality bus transport service, he added.
St. Mary’s Catholic High School chose the RTA because the buses are equipped with state-of-the-art safety and tracking systems, including student RFID (radio frequency identification) cards to log children on and off the bus, and GPS tracking of bus locations. The RTA communications system will include a call centre and online tracking of buses and students by parents.
Parents reported that there have been improvements in the bus transportation in comparison with the first day, however, they believed that more could have been done by the school and the RTA to minimise the problems when the school opened.
