By Mike Caputo
In a 4-2 vote at the board's June 19 meeting, the bus transportation guidelines were amended so that children will now be dropped off at "house stops" rather than the previously designated "corner stops." During the meeting, outgoing school board President Dr. Asher Mansdorf cited safety as the "bottom line" for the decision to alter the guidelines, which were originally established by a referendum voted on in May.
The estimated cost of drop-offs at house stops is $300,000, in addition to $600,000 already budgeted for the pre-K transportation program. The house stops make bus routes longer, thereby increasing the cost.
The cost of the busing program was a particularly acrimonious point of contention in the recent school board election, with public-school advocates asserting that the $600,000 allotment was unreliable because the exact number of students to be bused was not known. Private-school advocates insisted that the estimate was a valid one based on the information available.
The board's two public-school advocates, Pamela Greenbaum, who was serving as a board member for the final time, and Stanley Kopilow, sternly opposed the timing of the guideline alterations. Greenbaum said that student drop-offs should have been incorporated into the referendum and the guidelines earlier in the year.
"I have been screaming about safety since the meeting when this was first brought up," Greenbaum said. "My problem is that everybody didn't want to put it into the budget."
When the board originally drafted the referendum, it implemented centralized corner stops as drop-off points. Superintendent John Fitzsimons explained that that decision was made when both time and budgetary options were limited. Fitzsimons would not offer a recommendation on whether to use corner stops or house stops, but suggested that the board base its decision on information and financial statistics provided by his office.
Based on conversations with private-school officials prior to the meeting, Mansdorf pointed to the need to streamline the system by making arrival and dismissal times the same for both pre-K and kindergarten students. Mansdorf's plan calls for putting both pre-K and kindergarten students on the same buses to reduce the cost of busing, which he estimates at $48,000 a bus for a two-hour run in the morning and another two hours in the afternoon.
"If we are putting children together on one bus, we are using fewer buses," Mansdorf said.
He explained that his concern arose after discussions with district transportation officials about corner drop-offs. "What I have been told by people involved in the transportation arena is that they have tremendous concerns, having the possibility of dropping off children at corners without a responsible person there to get them," Mansdorf said. "That is a driving concern for them."
Kopilow, who will be the board's lone public-school advocate when it is reorganized in July, fumed while Mansdorf explained the reasoning behind the change. Kopilow demanded that a transportation official make a public presentation on the matter before it is decided.
"This is not a question of Stanley Kopilow saying Asher Mansdorf is not telling the truth," said Kopilow, who is an attorney. "I am just saying in my business, in a court of law, what we don't allow in most instances is what you are doing, which is what you call hearsay: someone else saying what someone else did. What you find is that we don't get at the truth. All I want is to hear it from the people who are actually going to be doing it."
Final financing figures and routes will be determined when the number of children involved is finalized after the recommended filing deadline for registering pre-K students on July 16. According to Mansdorf, the busing contractor, Independent Coach, and district transportation officials are already in the process of determining a tentative route schedule for the fall.
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