Summary
- Many Kenyan parents now face the headache of finding the best means to transport their children to school.
- Parents have the option of using official school bus and privately-owned transport services that are relatively more convenient, but in most cases there is the risk of overloading or accountability.
- Some parents consequently prefer to drive their children to school while others opt for carpooling that helps them make some savings on fuel compared to the former option.
- Still, there is the option of public transport that is cheaper but largely inconvenient and unreliable.
She used to pay Sh6,000 for her daughter, translating roughly to Sh100 per day for a short trip to and from school.
The
charges had been increased by Sh1,000 in the last four years, she says.
On the other hand, her son who in kindergarten in the same school used
to billed Sh4,000 per term.
This year, Ms Moraa moved
to a house barely 500 metres from the school and decided to be walking
her children to school before she heads to her work station in Nairobi’s
central business district. “Honestly what kept me paying was that I
wanted my children to feel the excitement of hopping onto a school bus
just like their friends. It’s also convenient and safe for them,” Ms
Moraa says. “But then it brought a bit of inconvenience on my part
because I had to wait until 7.15am for the children to be picked by the
bus. By that time, traffic to town (Nairobi CBD) has built and there was
risk of running late.”
She now walks the children to school well before 7am before heading to work.
The transport charges at the Donholm school may seem quite low for a typical average school in Nairobi.
Across
the other side of the Nairobi, at Braeburn Imani School, a parent who
did not want to be named says she would be paying Sh32,700 for a
distance that she approximates at six kilometres.
She
has two children at the school and even after moving closer, she still
finds the transport costs unaffordable. She has now opted for private
transport.
“If my children used school transport it would cost me almost
Sh70,000 per term yet my house is about 15 kilometres away. Now I drop
them off in the morning on my way to work. In the evening, I pay some
private transporter Sh500 to pick them. In a week, I spend Sh2,500 and
for three months which is basically the length of a term, I end using
about Sh37,500 which is half of what I would have paid for school
transport,” she says.
“I have also noticed a trend in
schools where the difference in cost between two-way bus transport and
one-way is so minimal that it makes no economic sense paying one-way,”
she adds.
Another school in Nairobi’s Lang’ata, a
middle-income estate, charges Sh9,000 per term for a pupil in Class
Three. A father, who requested not to be named in this story, says the
school is a 10-minute walk from his house but he has no option of not
paying for school transport.
“The school insists that the bus helps in bonding and eliminates class wars among children,’’ he says.
Their
story is a reflection of the struggles most parents go through to
ensure their children get to school and back home safely and more
conveniently.
This also mirrors a dysfunctional and
largely chaotic public transportation system due to years of neglect by
successive governments that have left the key sector in private sector
hands.
Many Kenyan parents now face the headache of finding the best means to transport their children to school.
Parents
have the option of using official school bus and privately-owned
transport services that are relatively more convenient, but in most
cases there is the risk of overloading or accountability.
Some
parents consequently prefer to drive their children to school while
others opt for carpooling that helps them make some savings on fuel
compared to the former option.
Still, there is the option of public transport that is cheaper but largely inconvenient and unreliable.
Whereas
official school transport — typically a non-core service in learning
institutions — stands out as the safest and most convenient when it
comes to time management, there are question marks bordering on charges.
Some parents see the charges by some of the schools as exorbitant.
“Some of these charges are big contributors to the high school fees,” said one parent.
A
few of the disgruntled parents who talked to BDLife said while their
pre-occupation was to find a well-performing school for their children
with affordable tuition fees, they were shocked on learning the charges
for non-core services such as transportation, lunch and club activities.
A
spot-check of transportation charges in some of the prestigious
schools, which have published them on their websites perhaps to enhance
transparency, shows parents in high-end schools part with as much as
Sh100,000 per term.
Kenya Private Schools Association
(KPSA), which says its mission is to co-ordinate, mobilise and regulate
private learning institutions to provide holistic and quality education,
says schools factor in many costs in calculating the transportation.
Mutheu
Kasanga, the KPSA chairperson said some of the considerations before
arriving at the charges include varied distances from schools as well as
cases where the buses usually come back empty for every trip they make.
“The
service is a luxury because essentially when (public) schools used to
work all children used to walk to school because there was a school
nearby and that school worked … performed (academically),” Ms Kasanga,
also a director at Lukenya Schools, said.
“That’s not
the case today and parents are moving their children long distances to
put them in schools where they have a chance of succeeding
(academically).”
Charges for return transport at
Hillcrest International School, for example, range from Sh54,300 to
Sh100,400 per term depending on its zoning based on distance from
school.
Braeburn School charges Sh155,400 annually for
transport from designated pick-up points, translating to an average of
Sh51,800 per term. This is for children in play group, nursery,
reception and those in Year 1 to Year 13.
The school has the option of door-to-door transport which is billed at Sh275,700, an average of Sh91,900 per term.
Recoup costs
Parents
with children at Crawford International School pay between Sh45,000 and
Sh58,000. At Kianda School, transportation charges per term range from
Sh13,500 for children in the neighbourhood such as sprawling Kangemi and
leafy Loresho to Sh25,500 for those in far-flung residences along
Mombasa Road and far end of Eastlands.
“In many
schools, parents drop off their children and those who can’t opt for the
bus because their personal schedule cannot cope,” Ms Kasanga said.
“There
is the element of safety because once you hand over your child to
school you know the child is safe as compared to using public transport
because ever since Kenya Bus died, Nairobi doesn’t have any public
transport that’s favourable for students,” the KPSA chairperson said.
The
schools give the parents the option of one-way transport, with parents
who fail to pick up their children beyond the stipulated time facing
fines to cater for overtime fees for the caretaker.
Despite
parents’ concerns over the high charges, Ms Kasanga said some schools
are not able to recoup all costs they incur in providing transport and
have to hire out their buses to cover some of the costs.
cmunda@ke.nationmedia.com
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