Text of Email sent out to all private schools to plan for busing for upcoming year

Following is a email sent out by Board of Education consultant Gus Kakavas to all the private schools administrators as to the plan for the upcoming school year.

As most of you know, the Board of Education’s Transportation Department and the State Monitor have been working tirelessly for the last three months to come up with an affordable plan that provided the maximum services possible. After much work and countless hours of meetings and discussions, we came up with “Plan B”. Unfortunately, late last month, that plan was rejected by the non-public administrators who needed to approve the concessions involved to move forward. With “Plan B” off the table, literally no time left for anymore planning meetings and no agreement for any uniform tiering, we have been left with only one viable plan to provide state-mandated services and still stay within our budget limitations.
As of today, at the direction of the State Monitor, I will begin to revise the Versa Trans parameters to remove all students from school bus assignments who do not meet the “over 2.0/2.5 miles” remote criteria (courtesy- bussed students). I will be sending out to you in the next few days a list of those students within your school so you can clearly identify who will not be receiving a bus seat assignment. I will also be sending a pink postcard to the home of each of these “NO Bus” students so the parents will be able to plan accordingly.
I have also been directed to only provide one dismissal per school as state law mandates. If I do not receive another “MAIN” afternoon time for your building from you by next Friday, I will use the current PM dismissal time that you created that has the greatest number of students assigned to it. That means that the same route that brings the students “IN” will also be the same route that brings them home or “OUT” (what we refer to as an “AM/PM Bus). Minyan buses in the morning will continue as before, but they will be exactly the same in the PM (at the normal Minyan times), with the same grades assigned in the PM as in the morning.  If there are multiple schools within the same campus (or same building) (same gender), we may combine those schools on the same route if practical (PM dismissal times would have to be in the workable same range).  This will be discussed with both schools’ administrators ahead of any combining of schools on routes (again, they will be the same gender).
ALL formerly “Trial-Tiered” schools will return to their former 9:00 AM “school start time” with the same drop-off window in place as the last decade of school years has had in place. These ten “trial” schools will no longer be tiered in the 2015/16 school year.
Friday buses will be as we discussed over these last three months – ALL girls schools will dismiss at 11:30 AM on Fridays and ALL boys will dismiss at 12:30 PM on Fridays (unless you want the mandated regular schedule time you receive Monday through Thursday). This is absolutely necessary to be able to provide the massive number of buses required to move much larger numbers of children going home in a compressed window of time than on normal Monday through Thursday schedules. This will make everyone’s Friday much more dependable with far better service.
Finally, for the Bus Contractors:
I will be sending you your list of routes from 2014/15 by Monday, July 27th. Please be ready to indicate what routes you will definitely renew, what routes you may want to renew when you see the actual completed 2015/16 version (in about 10-12 days) and finally what routes you definitely know you do NOT want to renew. Understand that we will be reducing the number of routes at each school to coincide with their number of non-remote students no longer receiving bus services. We will reduce the routes in reverse numeric order as required in order provide a clearly unbiased, consistent and fair methodology to apply all reductions at all schools. We will continue to keep the formerly tiered schools as close to 30-minute route times as possible to encourage your renewals of those routes even though they have returned to their former 9:00 AM “IN” time. When the routes are ready for bid, I will reach out to you one more time to review your actual route before it is included in the bid package in hopes you will renew it as now routed. Otherwise, all non-renewed routes will be bid – in a much abbreviated period of time – in order to assign as many students to bus seats as possible. Any routes not picked-up will see those “remote” children receive an “aid in lieu of” transportation check. Ahead of the actual completion of routing, I will send you the number of “eligible” students so you have an idea of how many buses each school will require. As soon as routes are complete, we will start the bidding process (I believe by the end of next week or the following Monday). Remember all routes will now be “AM/PM” routes.
The Transportation Department and I will be working as quickly as we can. We understand the deadlines and the huge challenges we face in the next six weeks. We know this is quite a change for all concerned. We will do our best to make it work as well as it possibly can in the first year of this change.
Thank you for your understanding and cooperation as we move forward to September’s opening day.”