JACKSON – The ongoing issue of transporting private school children jumped from Board of Education meetings to the Mayor and Council recently.
The township school district is unable to transport most of the students attending private schools. The state requires them to either bus the children or pay each family aid in lieu of transportation. A number of parents have come before the BOE during recent meetings to address the need for improved communication between them and the school district and for more lead time concerning the decision-making process.
Parents like Suri Robinson have come before the Board to share their stories and frustration about the difficulties of finding adequate transportation and that more time is needed to find and hire drivers to bring their children to private schools.
Even though the mayor and Township Council don’t govern the schools, Robinson urged the governing body to do whatever it could to reenforce the efforts of the BOE. She said “it causes an issue of public safety and traffic that involves a growing number of residents who send their kids to non-public schools. The Board of Education and transportation department is aware of these issues but I wanted to address it here.
“They are aware of the rapid growth of what is happening around the community. Right now, there is 3,200 children that go to Lakewood schools from Jackson and virtually none of them are being transported so it causes an issue of public safety,” Robinson added.
She said, “one school bus can displace over 50 cars on the road and unregulated car pools…(These) are issues of public safety and a tremendous issue of quality of life. There are parents spending hours of the day bringing their kids to school. I change my work plans at the last minute because there is no bussing. A lot of parents have had to cut back on their work hours.”
Robinson noted that in the past when Jackson had to transport out of school district students it was less of a problem but with the driver shortage for school busses, “there was no extra room (on the bus) to get the kids transported and a system built to help 400 to 500 kids a year. They can’t accommodate the projected 5,000 kids that will be attending non-public schools next year and all those cars that will be on the road. It has been a 30% a year increase for the past several years in students attending non-public schools.”
Robinson said parents attended a meeting with the school district’s transportation department in the past and were told by school officials there would be change “but nothing has changed. We were informed in August that we had no transportation. That put us in an impossible position to secure bussing for our kids.”
“There is also a lot of confusion over the paperwork between the schools, the parents, the transportation department. We are in the exact same position as we were last year. There is no actual change in progress out there. It is growing year after year and I am afraid we are headed nowhere again,” the parent added.
Resident Sheldon Hofstein also spoke about the issue. “There is one certainty, this is a state mandate and therefore an entitlement for those families who need this service. Remember, the state says we have to pay for it. The mandate has been in effect for more than 50 years and I doubt the state government at that time anticipated the possibility that thousands of children would be using this mandate.”
“The funds used for this mandate have become a severe drain on public school budgets and affects the public education school students. As more dollars are needed, school districts such as Jackson, Toms River, Brick, Manchester and Howell will eventually be forced to cut back on non-mandated expenses and raise school taxes,” Hofstein added.
Hofstein said such non-mandated expenses would include funding for art programs, music and band activities as well as sports programs and extracurricular programs. “The result will be the lack of a full education for public school students that their parents demand.”
“This council should request by passing a resolution stating the State should be responsible for funding its mandate, you should also include funding for special education. There are already mandates that the state picks up for schools and this includes health services, security programs, technology programs, textbook programs so the state should pick up its own mandate for the bussing issue,” Hofstein said.
He also recommended the Council work with the BOE and with those effected towns he mentioned along with state lawmakers urging them to enact laws that would provide relief to school budgets “that are feeling the burden of archaic laws.”
Resident Devorah Grushkin also spoke to the governing body about the growing issue. “I attended a Board of Education meeting along with a dozen other mothers in January and we explained the issues we face due to the lack of transportation for our private school children and the impact it is having on our lives.”
“We informed the Board that this is an incredibly time sensitive issue. I offered my assistance in communication and with planning as a mother and a transportation director in my school familiar with the complexity of transporting so many non-public school children to so many different schools. So far, my offer hasn’t been met with any communication,” Grushkin said.
She said that at a more recent BOE meeting around 200 parents came to the meeting to speak up to “bring up the urgency and safety issue that must be addressed.” She said those pleas were met with “blind repetition of trying to improve with no clear commitment or direction toward actual change.”
Grushkin said that through no fault of the school district it could not accommodate the unprecedented rapid growth of the non-public school system and that parents requested the school district “look at non-public school needs, realize it will be impossible to provide transportation in a safe manner. A few us pointed out that the Lakewood Board of Education faced similar challenges.”
She and other parents have asked the BOE to consider outsourcing the transportation services for their children as a better means to address the problem.
Council President Martin Flemming said “we have been in touch with the Board of Education about this and we are working together regarding the problem. I can’t say how fast it is going to be from our end because we don’t have a whole lot of control over the BOE.”
“We can give them our opinions and we can try to direct them in the way we want to go. They are going to go the way they want to go but we’re working at it,” Flemming added.
Council Vice President Andrew Kern commented that recently, “a judge approved that the State Department of Education needed to show the formula they used for how they distributed state funds from school district to district and how all those funds were redistributed in 2018.”
“The state needs to comply with this and not appeal so that we can all understand for transparency reasons and to work towards getting the most for our community. They need to show how they redistributed those funds and why so much was taken away from Jackson and other towns and allow us the opportunity to reclaim those funds,” Kern added.
