WESTERN BUREAU: The South Trelawny School Principals’ Association president, Rudolph Brown, has scheduled a meeting of the Association for next Friday to discuss the future of the South Trelawny school bus service.

“The members of the association will be meeting next week Friday to see if we can put the school bus service back in place,” Brown told the Observer.

The South Trelawny school bus service was introduced in February after member of parliament for the area, Doreen Chen, donated a bus to the South Trelawny Principals’ Association to transport students in the region.

The bus was purchased and refurbished at a cost of $1.8 million and was expected to ease the plight of the students finding it difficult to commute to school. But Brown said the service had been plagued with problems.

“We have been having problems with the bus since we started to operate it. In fact, the bus has not been in operation for one full week straight,” he said, adding that although the problems were minor they were costly.

The service was suspended almost six weeks because the Association did not have the approximately $40,000 to purchase the tyres needed to put it back on the road.

It is in an effort to get the service up and running again that next Friday’s meeting has been called.

Brown said he would propose that calls be made for a percentage of the profit from the recent Yamboree 2002 event be used for this purpose. In addition, he said a proposal to divest the school bus service would also be made.

“We need to get someone with the technical competence to operate the service. I don’t think that we can run it efficiently,” he said.

He was, however, hopeful that the service would resume before the start of June examinations.

“We definitely would like to see the service back in place very soon, especially before the start of examinations in June. Students in the area really benefited from it,” he said.

Meanwhile, Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) candidate for South Trelawny, Devon McDaniel told the Observer that since the suspension of the service, he had arranged for the students living in the Troy and Wilson Run communities to be transported to school.

But he said the service in these communities was only being offered to students attending the Albert Town High School and schools along the Troy to Albert Town route.