The district spent Millions on purchasing its own fleet of school buses. Now a report questions why the district still hired 3rd party companies if they can do their own busing. Th same buses that the BOE wants to lease to the township for Route 9 Shuttle buses
Lakewood owned enough school buses to cover its routes and questioned why the district still hired third-party companies to bus children on 67 routes.
APP reports The Lakewood school board voted to fire its student transportation chief Wednesday just a week after receiving an unfinished report that said the schools may be overpaying for public school busing. The Board of Education hired Ross Haber Associate..to study the district’s transportation operations. The review focuses on how about 5,500 public school children get to school, and whether it’s cheaper to do that with district-owned buses or use contractors.
In an update dated June 20 and given to the school board, Haber wrote that Lakewood owned enough school buses to cover its routes and questioned why the district still hired third-party companies to bus children on 67 routes.
“It appears that the District, which is transporting approximately 5,500 students, should have an adequate fleet to handle this number, especially when you consider all vehicles (large and small),” the report reads. About 6,000 children attend eight public schools in the township. Read more in APP
from the BOE report:
Addendum to June 20th Update
Although it is still in the preliminary phase I am finding that there are significant issues
regarding the District operated transportation program. These are:
a. A low load versus capacity percentage, on average, for both 54 and
24 passenger buses (non-special education).
b. Too many bus stops. Stop locations need to be evaluated.
c. There appear to be some poorly designed routes.
d. There appear to be too many contracted non-special education routes.
There are a number of 30 day contracted routes. This indicates, in my
opinion, is that transportation issues are resolved by throwing more buses
at them than using re-routing techniques.
e. Although I am told that the Versatrans map has been updated and that it is
now being used for routing I am not sure why this was so late in
happening, especially since the LSAT had an update in mid-year and is
fully implemented. The map that was used for 2017-18 by the District
was inaccurate. This is why I have spent a couple of days measuring
distances to insure that route mileages are correct and that eligibility is
measured correctly (still under analysis).
Although I am NOT drawing any final conclusions to this point I really believe that there
are serious management and technical issues which may be both financially and structurally
inefficient
Who was fired?
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