Students who are eligible to use School District 27’s transportation network can now register to take the school bus for the 2025-2026 academic year.
Registration opened on March 1 and will continue until April 30, followed by a second wave of registration open from May 1 to July 6.
Registrations for these first two waves are only for students who are eligible to be a school bus rider according to the district’s transportation policy. The policy states students eligible to ride the bus are those who attend but live beyond three kilometres of their catchment school, a catchment school being one which they are expected to attend due to its vicinity to their place of residence.
For students attending a ‘school of choice,’ meaning they do not live within the catchment area of the school they are attending, school bus use is not guaranteed. Nor is it for courtesy riders, including students who live within three kilometres of the school they attend.
Registration for these students is expected to be between July 6 and September 30, and seats are assigned to them only if there is availability on the transportation routes which are designed according to the needs of eligible riders. These students will be notified of their assignment by October at the latest, though the district’s director of instruction Sean Cameron said they will likely know sooner.
“With the updated processes most courtesy rider applications will be processed well before October. In many cases courtesy riders will be placed in July,” Cameron said in an email to simplymastery.
Cameron was referring to the district’s new approach to school bus registration, made possible by a district-wide update to its data system. Registration is now done completely online using a software called Transfinder rather than MyEdBC, a province-wide system which is known to cause headaches for its users.
The new system will automatically notify parents when their child has been assigned a seat on the school bus. For those in the first wave of registration, notifications will come by June 30 or earlier, and those in the second wave will be assigned by the end of August.
About 2,500 to 3,000 students are usually recorded using the district’s bus system. At the district’s March 10 regular board of education meeting, manager of operations Ben Bennison reported as of that morning there were already 710 registrations submitted.
Before registering their child, parents must read and agree to the district's new ridership agreement and bus protocols available to view online.
