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PORT ELGIN - A New Brunswick teen who needs a wheelchair to get around hasn't received government money for a wheelchair lift for the family van to help him get to school, even though he graduates in a couple of months.

"The system stinks," said Jack Reade of Upper Cape, father of 18-year-old Tantramar Regional High School student Evan Reade.

The Reades, who live in a rural community east of Port Elgin, are frustrated over stalled efforts to get government help to install a wheelchair lift on the van which is used to transport Evan to and from school.

"They tell me there's no money left in the fund," Jack Reade said Monday.

Evan, 18, is doing well in school but has muscular dystrophy as well as osteoporosis and no longer has the strength to get around on his own. He uses a wheelchair which is pushed, prodded and pried into the family van using a homemade lift created by his father.

But since dad is usually minding the family store, it most often falls to mom to wrestle the chair, with her son in it, into and out of the van.

It's a big job - the wheelchair and Evan outweigh his mother.

It's important that one of the parents be there to help, Jack Reade said, because teacher assistants aren't always immediately available when they pull into the school.

The provincial government has raised the family's ire because they have yet to receive help purchasing a lift, or a van with a lift, while their son is now preparing to graduate.

Officials from the Department of Transportation - which administers the fund to which the Reades have applied for help buying a lift, or a new vehicle with a lift - couldn't be reached Monday due to the Easter long weekend.

A lift for the family's van would cost approximately $28,000, while a van with a lift built into it would cost about $54,000. Both amounts are well beyond the means of the one-income family, where Evan's mother can't work full time due to attending to Evan's care.