Let me start this column off with a warning: I’ll be discussing a story I did for this week’s Town & Country, where I reported on the controversy surrounding the new Mandatory Entry-Level Training (MELT) requirements that the province wishes to impose on school bus drivers.
If you have read that article, you may want to abandon ship now, as I’ll be covering some of the same ground.
As I noted in that T&C piece, the province announced these new requirements for those seeking Class 1 and Class 2 licences, the latter of which is needed to drive a schoolbus.
The province was fuzzy on a lot of details during the initial announcement, promising more information would be coming soon.
Some preliminary investigation by school boards, however, suggested that new school bus drivers could be adding another 65 hours of training on top of what they already need to complete.
Alberta’s school boards were naturally disturbed. After all, it’s difficult enough recruiting both full-time and spare school bus drivers; adding greatly to the training burden for drivers wasn’t going to make that any easier.
After the proposal was reviewed by the Student Transport Association of Alberta, it also became evident that the MELT training had a lot of overlap with the training that’s required to get an S-endorsement on your licence, which would also become mandatory in order to be a school bus driver.
For those reasons and more, Alberta’s school boards came together and passed a motion during their fall meeting calling on the province to give them money for extra training, to recognize the overlap between MELT and the S-endorsement, to let their instructors offer MELT, etc.
Basically, it was a cry for help.
When I first heard about this, I couldn’t believe what the province was doing. Having listened to some discussions on this topic, however, I am now beginning to understand that the province launched this initiative with good intentions but a very poor understanding of what they were trying to accomplish.
For instance, not only did the province not understand the overlap between the new MELT program and the S-endorsement training, they didn’t realize the latter was THEIR program all along.
While the province is almost guaranteed not to give school boards any extra money — they can’t even fund transportation properly — there will likely be changes in the future to make the program more palatable.
Still, it’s a strong example of how good intentions can’t compensate for incompetence.
