The free school transportation service dubbed ‘Al-Ameen' started this academic year for female students will be extended to female teachers and male students across the nation next year, said Prince Khaled Bin Abdullah Bin Muqrin Aal-Mushari, Deputy Minister of Education for Girls' Education. The newly-introduced school transportation maintains a safe, secure, and reliable service to initially 388,924 female students, or 27 percent of the total female students enrolled in government schools. Over 4,000 buses driven by Saudis have already been deployed in the regions of Riyadh, Makkah, Madina, Eastern Province, Qassim, Northern Frontiers, and Al-Jouf. Foreign drivers have been excluded to both help curb unemployment among Saudis and to make it more culturally appropriate. The transportation cost is estimated at SR1,691 a year for each student and is completely covered by the government, Prince Khaled added. The contract the Ministry of Education signed with Hafil is valued at SR1.8 billion for the current phase of the project out of an entire SR3 billion for the service. The service comes to complement an old transportation service introduced in some regions in the Kingdom. The project has come to ease traffic congestion at peak hours where Saudi families tend to take their girls in private cars to school. During the first semester of this academic year, the service will be accompanied by a massive public awareness campaign on its mechanism, safety precautions, bus routes and stops. The bus company has started to create a complete database of students and schools using the service. The buses will be tracked and monitored during operation hours for any emergency through an electronic system linked with control rooms throughout the Kingdom's departments of education, he said.
