Some local students expressed frustrations after the first day of school now that the school bus extras have been eliminated.
The 2025-26 school year began on Tuesday morning which was the first day that secondary students had to navigate their way to school without the bus extras.
Two Grade 11 girls at Vincent Massey expressed their concerns over the cut on Tuesday afternoon as they waited for the 305 with Transit Windsor so they could head home.
Both of the girls stated their previous 20 minute commute on the school bus extra is now nearly a one hour commute as they take two transit buses to make it to Massey.
Gurleen, a Grade 11 student at Massey, says this will have daily impacts.
"First of all, we have to wake up a lot earlier which as students, sleep is really important, and time is really important. So, that's been impacted. And we have to walk quite far from the school, and when the weather is bad that's not very helpful."
She says she has to take two buses to get to and from school.
"I have two more years left here, and I'll just have to take the public bus now, but it's hard, we have to plan everything, have our Google Maps on all the time, and it's affecting our schedule a lot."
Harleen Rai, another Grade 11 student at Massey, says her parents are worried about her taking public transit.
"I've been taking the extra buses, which come at the same stop and they drop us off at the school, which they did before. But now, we have to switch buses so parents are concerned about our safety."
Kieran McKenzie, ward 9 councillor and acting chair of the Environment, Transportation, and Public Safety Standing Committee, was outside of Holy Names on Tuesday morning to see if any students were impacted by the school bus extras being eliminated.
He says he was pleased with how the morning went.
"The transition to where we are in the service delivery has been, I think, manageable. There hasn't been the backlogs, or a huge number of students arriving late for school, which I think is a very, very good sign. It shows me that families have been able to adjust to the new schedules that they need to adjust to."
He says for the small handful of students that were late the city will need to look at why this happened.
"What was your departure time? Were the buses that you were taking - did they arrive on time to get you to where you thought you were going to go? So those are questions that we need to ask, absorb, look at the feedback and figure out if there's some quote-on-quote tweaks that we could potentially look at making."
McKenzie says it's going to take time to adjust.
"Everyone's going through a transition, and we're just going to work together to manage it as best we can, and it looks like we were off to a pretty good start."
Nine buses were being used for the school bus extras and have since been reassigned to other reconfigured routes in the city so students have more options to get to class.
The school bus extras were initially put in place to take pressure off regular transit routes during the school year, but during budget time it was called a "concierge-level of service for a small number of secondary school students".