Nearly 11,000 children to lose free busing in Lakewood

LAKEWOOD – Nearly 11,000 children attending public and private schools will be without free busing in the coming school year, the school district announced Thursday.

The dramatic move affects an estimated 8,400 private school students and another 2,400 public school students who in prior years would have qualified for courtesy, or non-mandatory, busing, under the district’s busing guidelines.

But times have changed. The district is now under the supervision of a state-appointed monitor, Michael Azzara, who made the decision to cancel the courtesy busing program in the face of a transportation budget shortfall of $8.3 million.

Azzara’s decision comes after recent negotiations with leaders of the township’s private Orthodox Jewish religious schools failed to either resuscitate plans to stagger the private schools’ start and dismissal times or find another affordable alternative, he said.

“We’ve run out of time,” Azzara said Thursday. “In order to have buses ready to take kids to school we have to start the (bidding) process now.”

The change will leave 53 percent of all public school students without busing for next year, the district said. That means a huge headache for thousands of parents who will have to scramble to find ways to get their children to school safely — and potentially nightmarish driving conditions for motorists on Lakewood’s already congested roads.

“We’re disappointed,” Schools Superintendent Laura Winters said Thursday after she and Azzara briefed township officials at the municipal building about the busing crisis. “We were hoping for a better situation.”

State law requires districts to provide free busing to children in both public and private schools who live beyond a set distance from their schools. The limit is two miles for elementary pupils and 2.5 miles for high school students. Mandatory busing will cost the district $12.7 million for the 2015-16 school year.

For many years, however, Lakewood has extended free busing to all students who live more than a half-mile from their schools, citing a lack of sidewalks and the unsafe condition of many of the township’s roadways.

Deal collapses

In April, a cross-section of community leaders hammered out an agreement that would have saved the district $3 million by staggering, or tiering, start and dismissal times at more than 100 Orthodox private schools starting in September, allowing fewer buses to transport the same number of students.

The deal, which would have required schools to move their start times by 15 minutes, was the linchpin of a broader plan aimed at avoiding a fall referendum asking taxpayers to make up the courtesy busing shortfall.

The New Jersey Department of Education agreed to help. It was ready to provide $2 million in additional funding for the coming school year, contingent on the tiering plan remaining in place, Azzara said. The money would have come through the restructuring of refund payments the district owes the state, Azzara said.

The Township Committee, meanwhile, indicated it was willing to provide another $500,000, Azzara said. Together, those moves would have closed a transportation shortfall that, at the time, stood at approximately $6 million.

Then, in late June, the deal unexpectedly unraveled. A rabbi involved in the April talks informed the district in an email that the schedule change was no longer acceptable because it would cause too much disruption for school families and staff.

What was more, he said that the 10 or so largest Orthodox schools that had tiered their schedules during the 2014-15 school year, on a trial basis, would revert to their normal start time, which had been 9 a.m. for all of the private Orthodox schools. That move would have rolled back an additional $2 million in courtesy busing savings.

Since then, Azzara has received a pair of letters from an attorney with a Washington, D.C. law firm, David J. Butler, on behalf of a group called the Lakewood Association for Equality in Education, asserting that it was unlawful to deny busing to private school students on the basis of their schools’ start and dismissal times. Butler could not be reached for comment Thursday. Azzara said no lawsuits have been filed to date over the busing issue.

Shannon Mullen: 732-996-6921; smullen4@gannettnj.com