For those living in deep rural Jamaica, the absolute imperative of a dedicated, well-organised school bus system is self-evident.

We suspect that Transport Minister Mr Daryl Vaz, who is Member of Parliament for Portland Western, understands the situation as well as anyone.

Shortly after taking over the portfolio last year he spoke of the dire situation for many rural children having to leave home long before daylight to attend school and then getting home as late as “10 o’clock at nights”.

Mr Vaz asked the obvious question: “So what kind of learning environment is that…?”

The need for civilised transportation for schoolchildren took on wings last month with the death of two Titchfield High School students, and injury to others, in a crash said to have been caused by speeding.

As has happened repeatedly down the decades, the latest road tragedy renewed calls for a school bus system involving properly trained, supervised, and accountable drivers.

“We find money for everything else…” Jamaica Teachers’ Association President Mr Leighton Johnson was reported as saying.

Inevitably, the badly needed system featured high as Mr Vaz made his contribution to the sectoral debate in Parliament this week.

“As a rural MP [Member of Parliament], I will not rest until this rural school transportation system is up and running …,” he vowed.

“We need to do something; we see the horrific accidents happening which can’t continue. They [students] cannot learn and excel in the conditions that they are travelling and the miles that they are walking…” he added.

Mr Vaz says an annual subsidy of $10.62 billion will be required to adequately provide for such a system.

It means any such project will be a huge challenge.

A great help would be for students to attend schools close to home. That would not only reduce tragedies such as that in Portland last month, but make it easier for the children of the poor to access education.

A decade ago, former Speaker of the House and then Member of Parliament for Manchester Southern Mr Michael Peart led calls for exactly that.

We recall Mr Peart’s lament in 2013 following the death of four students of Holmwood Technical High School in a bus crash in northern Manchester.

The victims included teenager Mr Okeem Gordon from Alligator Pond at the southern-most tip of Manchester. Every school day he travelled about 60 miles — 30 miles either way — with a switch of taxi in Mandeville, the geographic centre of Manchester.

This was although he was going past several high schools on the way. That remains the case for far too many of our children who record high levels of absenteeism from school because of high transportation and other costs.

All too often those children are from our most impoverished families, denied places at well-equipped, well-endowed ‘schools of choice’ because grades in high school entrance exams were not considered good enough.

There is no easy way, but the challenge and expense of that much-needed rural school bus system could be much reduced if Jamaicans and their leaders could embrace the principle of children attending schools closest to their homes.