Transportation plan for Island Park and Long Beach

The Island Park School District will expand its partnership with the Long Beach School District this year, sharing transportation services — a move, school officials say, that will save both districts thousands of dollars.

At a Sept. 13 Long Beach Board of Education meeting, the school district’s chief operating officer, Michael DeVito, announced that the two districts, which have benefited from shared services for 30 years, had agreed on a plan that will continue to strengthen their “wonderful

collaborative relationship around transportation.”

The Long Beach district has provided maintenance for Island Park’s school vehicles for three decades, DeVito said, and for the past three years it has allowed Island Park to use its fueling station as well. “They pay for the fuel they use,” he explained. “They fuel up at our facility, [and] it saves them about a dollar per gallon, which yields about $18,000 in savings in terms of taxes [per year].”

He continued, “…They’ve asked us if there’s any way to expand on our partnership in terms of transportation. For this school year, 2011-12, we’re going to be helping Island Park with some of their transportation and saving them approximately $130,000 … With the collaboration, they’re going to be saving Long Beach $80,000.”

According to Island Park Superintendent Dr. Rosmarie Bovino, the agreement is really nothing new. “It’s an agreement we’ve had with Long Beach for years, but this year we were both able to save a little more money,” she said. “We do a lot of cooperative transportation agreements with Long Beach and with the Southwest transportation quadrant, and also with Nassau BOCES.”

The agreement comes after the Island Park district, which does not have a high school and sends its teens to either West Hempstead or Long Beach High, announced in May that it planned to cut some of its late bus service for high school students in an effort to save money in tough economic times.