In a way the Isle of Wight Council can't be held entirely responsible for abandoning children to find their own of getting to school; they have had their education budget cut drastically over the last decade and savings have to be found somewhere.

Of course, two factors have taken big chunks out of the council's budget:

1. choosing to close a school which was in debt to the tune of tens-of-thousands of pounds (which comes straight out of the council's education budget for this year, instead of that one school paying down their debt over a number of years).

2. Opting to expand one school instead of allowing the displaced children to fill the surplus places in all of the remaining schools in the area — building temporary classrooms to accommodate those children, the bill for which is picked up by the council.

This money could, instead, have been spent on school transport.

Leaving parents to find a way of getting their children to school and themselves to work on time, on a budget, does illustrate just how out of touch the Tories in County Hall are with their constituents, and how little they care about the effect their utterly incompetent decisions have on us.

Still, if you've been enjoying the traffic chaos which has been caused by Cllr Ward's inability to properly plan for the all-to-predictable removal of the rarely-floating bridge from service while the St Mary's roadworks are ongoing, you're going to love it in September when hundreds of parents are forced to drive their children to school and add to the congestion.

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