IN A U-TURN, Argyll and Bute Council is considering cancelling schoolchildren’s flights to Coll.
The parents of Coll and Colonsay children have been asked to ratify a move by council officials to cancel all weekend flights for high school pupils to Coll, in favour of flying children back to Colonsay.
In the letter shown to The Oban Times, parents are given two options stating: ‘The winter Caledonian MacBrayne timetable has scheduled sailing to Coll every Saturday and returning Sunday up until January 4 2009.
‘There are no weekend sailings to Colonsay for the winter but should we use scholar flights, we could get Colonsay pupils home too, for one night each week.’
The flights for island pupils was one of the council’s justification for its controversial £9m Argyll Air Services operating out of Oban Airport.
Parents are then being asked by the council to make a choice in this matter.
Coll parent Paula Smalley said: ‘I demand the service that I was promised from the council. It should not be an either or. We all want the same thing, we all want our children home within good time at the weekend on the flights as we were promised.
‘We accepted a new airstrip on the strength of the student flights – and now we are being asked to forego them. This is emotional blackmail.
‘The letter we have received from the hostel shows that the was no real commitment to getting children home by plane.’
Colonsay parent Seamus McNeil said: ‘If the council had not miscalculated their numbers in the first place then we wouldn’t be in this mess.
‘The council calculated that there would be eight children from the islands on the flights, forgetting that they already had around 20 pupils at Oban High School.
‘There are not enough seats on the planes. We have been promised more but they have never materialised.
‘I believe the air service was only ever used as a bargaining tool so that the airport could be improved in Oban.’
Argyll and Bute Council’s press office first stated this week that there was ‘no intention to change the current arrangements’, but later the same day, after The Oban Times presented it with the information in the letter, a statement was released to say: ‘…the council wishes to discover whether parents feel that the summer arrangements should continue or whether there would be any advantage to the children to altering those arrangements to take account of the winter timetable.
‘To this end the council has been asking parents their opinion on the matter, and will be speaking with them further this week. In the meantime, we have no intention of making any changes to the current arrangements.’
