Source: Radio New Zealand
123RF
An Auckland mother says changes to ministry-funded school transport for disabled students are putting vulnerable children at risk.
The Ministry of Education is overhauling the Specialised School Transport Assistance (SESTA) scheme.
For Auckland’s North Shore, specialist transport provider R&R Total Mobility has been replaced by Ritchies Transport.
One mother, who asked to remain anonymous, said she pulled her wheelchair-bound son from a Ritchies Transport van on the first day of service, because she feared it was unsafe.
She said the previous service had transported her son and other wheelchair users safely for years, with experienced drivers trained to work with children with disabilities.
When she met the new driver assigned to her son before the start of term, she became concerned about his level of experience handling electric wheelchairs and children with complex needs.
”He’d never seen a wheelchair like this before,” she said. “It was obvious he didn’t know how to drive it.”
The woman said she became increasingly worried, after discussing how children with mixed abilities would be grouped together in shared vans.
”What happens if a kid gets upset at the noises and he can get out of his seat, and go and do something to my son, who can’t defend himself?”
The mother said she decided not to let her son travel, after watching the driver attempt to load him into the vehicle on the first day of school.
I got him on, and the interaction with the driver and the wheelchair was enough to scare me that this was very unsafe,” she said. “We didn’t even get to tethering the chair into the van.
”I just said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not confident with this. It bothers me a lot. I don’t think it’s a safe situation’.”
She is now paying privately to use the previous transport provider, so her son can continue attending school.
The woman was also concerned that some vans were not appropriately configured for large powered wheelchairs and whether drivers could adequately monitor children seated at the back of vehicles.
“One of the children turned up to school on the first day and his chair didn’t fit in the way that it should have fit, so he was tethered in sideways into the van,” she said. “That’s how bad it was.”
The parent also questioned whether vulnerable students could be safely supervised in mixed transport arrangements involving children with differing behavioural and sensory needs.
“The kids in the wheelchairs are very vulnerable. They can’t defend themselves,”
Ritchies Transport and the Ministry of Education have been approached for comment.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand