Lakewood: Thousands of Yeshiva and Bais Yaakov Students May Lose Busing

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school-busLakewood, NJ – Township streets are about to get a lot more crowded during school hours.

Thousands of nonpublic and public schools students will be forced to either walk to school or find their own transportation next September under the school district’s new $151 million budget.

The township school district has decided to eliminate courtesy busing for public and nonpublic students in fourth through 12th grades as part of its district spending plan – a move that some community leaders said could create safety issues as well as gridlock in the township.

Instead of preserving the busing for older students who live within 2.5 miles of their school, the Board of Education opted to preserve the practice for younger students who live within 2 miles for their schools. The board also decided not to move ahead with a ballot question that would have asked voters to spend millions more to fund courtesy busing for all students in all grades. Read more at the Asbury Park Press.

{Matzav.com Newscenter}


7 COMMENTS

  1. It used to be that a student was entitled to busing if he had to cross a major highway or live a mile or more from school, for safety reasons. Now most of the schools are in the industrial park or in neighborhoods where there are no sidewalks so kids cannot walk or bike to school. This is a very bad move for the BOE busing and Lakewood township. Perhaps all the schools will have to purchase and run their own buses, and parents will have to pay for it.

  2. There is absolutely no way for children to walk 2.4 miles – crossing many busy streets without croosing guards – safely. Driving the impacted students would fill the streets with hundreds, if not thousands of cars clogging each and every street. Imagine the chaos on a rainy or snowy day!

    I would suggest that the schools declare one day ‘NO BUSSING DRY-RUN DAY’ and cancel busses just to show how dangerously congested the streets will become.

  3. You get what you pay for. If you don’t want to pay taxes, in the long run you won’t get the services. “Don’t tax me!” and “I want it anyway!” set up a real-world problem. According to the article, almost 80% of the courtesy busing children go to private schools (aka yeshivas). Add in special ed for kids in private schools, and you’ve got a lot of cash floating around. Where is it going to come from? The secular system isn’t going to tolerate selling its own kids short to pay for ours indefinitely. It’s a setup for long-range inter-community friction.

  4. 80% of the taxes come from the yeshiva families and we are supporting the illegal immigrants that take up space in our public schools.

    For those of you who think we don’t pay taxes (aka #3) we happen to have the highest property tax in the nation (or close to it.) Many of us are paying 10K a year or more. You would think that they can use it for what we need -like garbage pickup & busing. What else is it for?

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