Some parents and caregivers of special needs kids in Surrey say school buses aren't picking up their children.

The Surrey school district contracts out bus pickup for many of its students, with special needs students getting specialized help from a company called called First Student. Marcia McNaughton, who cares for a teen with autism, says the bus hasn't come to pick him up once this school year.

"I thought it was going to be a couple days. It's now been three weeks," she told CTV News.

It's at least a 20 minute walk to his high school, Johnston Heights Secondary, across several busy intersections. McNaughton says his mother can't drive, and doesn't speak English very well. So he relies on the bus to get to school.

McNaughton has been caring for the boy for several years. She says he's fairly high-functioning, but has trouble carrying on reciprocal conversations. She doesn't think he'd be able to ask for directions if he needed to, and makes her worried about having him walk to school.

Parents scramble to make alternate arrangements

McNaughton has been going straight from her job to pick up the boy she cares for every afternoon this school year while the mother calls in favours to get her son to school in the morning.

"It's maddening to me," McNaughton said. "That's a bit of his independence, too. He gets on the bus, he goes home and he lets himself in. He's capable of doing that."

In a phone interview, First Student told CTV that it encourages parents to fill out an application for bus service before school starts.

"The start of the school year is very hectic for us," explained spokesperson Chris Kemper.

he also pointed out a North-America wide shortage of bus drivers, but couldn't address whether Surrey is experiencing a personnel crunch.

When McNaughton and the boy's mother phoned the company, both described the response as rude and dismissive. They were told her that a bus driver would call the family to coordinate a pickup at a later time.

School district figuring it out

The school district says it hopes to have kids who have been left behind get aboard buses by next week. They estimate there are between 25 and 40 children still waiting for a pickup plan.

Doug Strachan, a spokesperson for Surrey Schools, mentioned late registration as a factor behind students not getting picked up.

"There can be a delay of a week or two typically to get all those late registrations slotted into the system to be picked up. It's unusual to be this late in the year," he said.

He added that schools have the option of making alternate arrangements when bus service isn't working, such as using taxis to get students to school.

The teen's mother told CTV News she'd completed his paperwork in advance but school administrators told her there was an issue on their end that had delayed submission of his application until the first week of school.

He had been riding the same route for the past five years without issue.

Update Sept. 23, 2017.

A day after this CTV story aired, McNaughton says a bus driver contacted her to say the boy she cares for will be picked up starting on Tuesday, Sept. 26.

With a report from CTV Vancouver's Penny Daflos.