APP - LAKEWOOD – For a brief time, it looked like taxpayers and parents of school-age children would be spared the usual drama over the school district’s ever-contentious transportation budget.
Now, the wheels have fallen off the bus.
This past week, the district announced it was canceling courtesy bus service for nearly 11,000 public and private schoolchildren, starting in September. The district said it had run out of time to find a way to close an $8.3 million funding gap.
More bad news: Township officials have no idea yet how they’ll cope with the resulting mayhem on the roads.
At a minimum it will require the hiring of extra crossing guards and a major shift of police resources.
“It has the potential to put a huge drain on the township,” Mayor Albert Ackerman said Friday.
“I’m hoping for an eleventh-hour reprieve,” a grave-sounding Police Chief Robert Lawson said.
Lawson got a taste of what’s to come last year, when Orthodox Jewish parents took to their vehicles to demonstrate their displeasure over plans to scrap courtesy busing.
For three days, parents drove their children to private religious schools, rather than putting them on buses, to show how much worse Lakewood’s notoriously congested streets would be without courtesy busing service. While some roads were badly congested, the police department managed to keep traffic moving, Lawson said. But it took significant manpower to pull it off.
And that was three days. “The question is,” Lawson said, “what’s it going to be like on a daily basis, when it’s the norm, not the exception.”
The Rev. Glenn Wilson has a good idea what it’ll be like.
“Chaos,” he predicted.
As it stands, an estimated 8,400 private school students and another 2,400 public school students — which is 53 percent of all children in Lakewood’s public schools — will have to find some other way to get to and from school.
The district isn’t obligated to provide busing for these students because they live closer to their schools than the distances set by the state’s mandatory busing policy: two miles away for elementary pupils and 2.5 miles for high schoolers.
For years, the district, acting on its own, has extended free busing to all students, public and private, who live more than a half-mile from their schools, citing the lack of sidewalks and the unsafe conditions of many of the township’s roads. Due to the explosive growth of Lakewood’s Orthodox Jewish community, the cost of that convenience has skyrocketed.
Children who live beyond the two- and 2.5-mile limits won’t be affected by the change.
“It’s awful,” Wilson, head of Lakewood U.N.I.T.E., a group that represents the interests of the mostly African-American and Latino public-school community, said of the loss of courtesy busing, “but the handwriting has been on the wall for years. We’ve been asking for solutions for years.”
Wilson and a diverse group of other community leaders thought they had a partial solution, or at least a temporary fix, back in April, when the leaders of the township’s Orthodox private schools agreed to stagger, or tier, their start and dismissal times, starting in September.
Multiplied by the more than 100 Orthodox schools scattered throughout town, the change would have yielded $3 million in annual savings for taxpayers, allowing fewer buses to transport the same number of students.
The agreement was hailed as a major breakthrough in a town long torn along religious, racial and ethnic lines. But it didn’t last.
The private school leaders later deemed the scheduling change too disruptive for school families and staff, and backed out of the deal.
That decision packed a $5 million wallop. The amount included an extra $2 million in savings that were lost when the largest 10 or so Orthodox schools, which had tiered their schedules as a cost-saving measure for the 2014-15 school year, also decided to revert to a 9 a.m. start time.
The schools’ uniform 9 a.m. is seen as a benefit for the many parents whose schedules revolve around the operating hours of Beth Medrash Govoha, the large yeshiva in Lakewood. Rabbi Aaron Kotler, BMG’s president and chief executive officer, endorsed the tiering plan.
The deal’s collapse also cost the district another $2 million in aid pledged by the New Jersey Department of Education, and another $500,000 in assistance the district anticipated securing from the Township Committee. All of that funding was contingent on the tiering plan.
“We believed we had a fair and responsible plan. However, the plan required cooperation from all involved, and without that cooperation we can’t move ahead unilaterally,” Department of Education spokesman Michael Yaple said in an email Friday.
“What was being proposed was nothing different from the same practices used by hundreds of school districts throughout the state,” Yaple added.
What’s next?
What went wrong? Michael Azzara, the state-appointed monitor who oversees the district, said last week that he was at a loss to explain why the deal unraveled.
“We were blindsided,” he said.
Private school leaders could not be reached for comment Friday. But Mayor Ackerman, who is Orthodox, cited two key factors he believes came into play.
First, he said, he has heard that the logistics of the tiering plan, which involved a 15-minute schedule adjustment, turned out to be more difficult for some schools than anticipated.
“It got to be too complicated for them to do it the way the (district) wanted it,” said Ackerman, who emphasized that he wasn’t deeply involved in the busing negotiations. “There were a lot of variables. Some were easy to meet, but some weren’t.”
A more sensitive issue, however, is taxes, he said.
As an Orthodox father of seven children said Friday, “We pay a lot of taxes. This is one of the few things that we get.” The man, who was eating lunch with his family at the Four Corners Kosher Bagel & Cafe on East County Line Road, declined to give his name.
Underlying that sensibility is the widely held view that the solution to the funding problem lies not in stop-gap measures that require the private schools to alter the way they operate, but in increasing the amount of state aid the district receives.
The state’s current funding system is tied to the district’s public school enrollment, which stands at roughly 5,000, and doesn’t fully take into account the more than 20,000 Orthodox children who are legally entitled to certain government benefits, including busing, special education and tutoring, even though they attend private religious schools, Ackerman and others have said.
“That’s how people feel,” the mayor said.
Whether massive gridlock in September will make state leaders in Trenton any more receptive to such an argument remains to be seen.
In the meantime, local officials and residents are bracing for major problems on the roads come September, though some are still hopeful another deal can be reached.
Said one Orthodox mother of three, who declined to give her name, “We’re praying that it’s going to work out.”
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