A father of five in Vancouver is considering launching a legal challenge against the British Columbia government after being told he could no longer allow his children under 10 to take public transit to school with their older siblings.

Last year, Adrian Crook began allowing his five kids, then aged between six and 10, to take the city bus to school without him. He had accompanied them on the same route for more than a year, trained them on every aspect of the ride, and gave them GPS-enabled cellphones so he could track them as they began to ride to and from school without him.

But that came to a halt after someone made an anonymous complaint to the Ministry of Children and Family Development. Though the kids had not had any problems on their commute up to that point, the complaint compelled the ministry to investigate.

Officials eventually ordered Crook to sign a “safety plan” promising not to leave his three children who are still under age 10 unsupervised, inside or outside the home.

Crook has followed that directive stringently, fully aware the ministry can take away his custodial rights. So since the fall, he has gone back to riding the bus with his kids, both to their irritation and his own.

“This past year has been a return to almost a worse state, quite frankly, because in addition to having to take the bus with them twice a day for over three hours of my day, I can’t let any kid under 10 do really anything on their own,” Crook told CTV’s Your Morning Wednesday, from Vancouver.

“So even crossing the street to go to the corner store is out of the picture for the ones under 10.”

Crook says he hoped his kids using the bus without him would teach them a valuable life lesson.

“Quite frankly, teaching them independence is a fantastic gift and really our No. 1 responsibility as parents,” he said.

Crook firmly believes that child protection workers have an important job to do, and should step in when there are cases of abuse and outright neglect. But he says that simply wasn’t the case with his family.

“The ministry did tell me that they didn’t consider this a case of neglect, that I had gone ‘above and beyond’ what any reasonable parent would be expected to do, and there was no precipitating incident that led to their involvement,” he said.

“So, in cases like that where you’ve got no incident and this is based on a clear sense of doing what’s right for kids and they aren’t in danger, I don’t think that should be a case of ministry intervention.”

Crook appealed to the ministry to conduct an internal review of the procedures it used to investigate his case. To his surprise, they agreed to the review, which is ongoing.

The ministry also asked a social worker to review his specific case and decide whether the conditions in his safety plan could be more specific. He expects to hear about that by May 15.

After Crook receives the new conditions, and depending on what the ministry concludes in its review, he may challenge the ministry in court and has a team of attorneys at the ready.

“We were fortunate enough to have raised about $45,000 via crowdfunding on GoFundMe for that privilege,” he said. “So we hope to take it to that level and hopefully push back on behalf of all parents.”