THE Transport Authority says several students from southern Clarendon have refused to travel on designated buses provided for them under the Safe School Bus programme.

The statement from the Transport Authority yesterday was in light of Tuesday’s accident on Foga Road in May Pen when a vehicle, which it said was operating illegally as a taxi, overturned, injuring several students of the Garvey Maceo High School.

A team from the authority’s operations division has since been dispatched to the crash scene to assess the situation and will be conducting further investigations into the matter.

In the meantime, the authority has urged students and general road users to use legal public passenger vehicles only, and appealed to parents of students from Garvey Maceo and all other schools involved in the Safe School Bus Programme to ensure that they utilise the approved school buses as it is safer to do so.

The authority has also called on civic groups in Clarendon to help galvanise support for the programme, which was launched on February 2, 2015. The authority has, meanwhile, implemented a public education campaign dubbed ‘Choose Right, Choose Life’ to encourage the use of legal public passenger vehicles.