Ironing out the school busing problems

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New York State mandates the distances that school districts must provide transportation to students, but it is left to the districts to establish the bus routes, the pick-up points and how many children are a bus and how many stops are made.

The distances are measured from the shortest routes between the student’s home and the school he or she is attending. The commissioner of the State Education Department (SED) has ruled that 90 minutes is a “reasonable” amount of time for children from 4 to high school age to be on the bus for a one-way trip.

“School bus stops are established by weighing a multitude of factors existing at every stop,” said SED spokesman Jonathan Burman. “There is no formula for districts that does not involve a judgment call. The commissioner of education has ruled that, depending on the circumstances, one-way trips of up to one-and-one-half hours are not necessarily excessive.”

When the first few days of Yeshiva Ketana of Long Island’s school year began, Elisha Jacobwitz and a few other mothers thought that being on a bus for almost two hours was excessive. She said that the bus her 4-year-old son is on has 24 children and makes 22 stops including going to Far Rockaway, and with all the changes of drivers within the first week a seven-minute distance from her home in Lawrence to the Inwood school was turned into an odyssey for a majority of the children on the bus. One trip home a child became dehydrated, she said.
“I don’t believe that four-year-olds should be on the bus that long, and there are too many kids and too many stops,” Jacobowitz said.

Lawrence Transportation Supervisor Jeremy Feder said that after receiving calls from a few parents about that specific route he followed the bus twice and found that the route could be done in 40 minutes. The school district contracts with Independent Coach Corp. for is buses.

“The mothers want shorter, safer trips and what we found the first week was children not at the bus stop and some are house stops and no one was outside waiting for the bus, this takes time,” Feder said. With twenty-two stops it adds up.”

Rabbi Tzvi Krigsman at Yeshiva Ketana said that younger children take a little longer to get ready and those first few days of school are very emotional for both the parents and children, and this may account for more time being spent picking up the children.

“I’m proud to say that our administration works hand-in-hand with the Lawrence School District, and I’m very pleased with the open lines of communication,” Krigsman said. “We brought this concern to their attention and they responded. What drove part of it as well were the first day taking pictures and the bus driver allowing it. It adds up. Since we started working with Jeremy Feder, we shaved a lot of minutes off the route.”

To register a complaint and solve a problem, Feder suggests that parents call their school’s transportation coordinator.