Update from the LSTA Director Avraham Krawiec:
1- Today starts the negotiation process and vendor collaboration for missing routes. The vendors sit together and see what they can collaborate on to allow more children to get busing.
2- Falsehoods, rumors and assumptions all create impediments to moving this process along. The LSTA can only deal in facts and we will continue to communicate those.
a- Fact- This bill that was signed and created the LSTA can’t create more drivers in Lakewood or more vendors.
b- Fact- This bill cannot dictate which routes are picked up by which vendor.
c- Fact- Durham and vamvous (without taking into account the other venders that left town) leaving town as unhappy vendors, left a void of 125 routes that were serviced last year that are now open.
d- Fact -the vendors rightfully bid out their buses to other towns and areas as the bill was signed late and they needed to have their buses in service.
e- Fact- we are making do with less, we are serving presently around 24- 25k of our children and yet the process in ongoing with and besides all of the above issues.
f- Fact- minimizing our stops have translated into getting more kids on buses despite dealing with the shortage of buses and drivers.
g- Fact – for those that don’t have busing this process is agonizing and frustrating. The LSTA is aware and understands of this.
h- Fact- we are working on bringing past vendors back and we are slowly making headway.
The new norm of less stops and everybody working together is the only way any busing entity will work in Lakewood with our growth year over year. We very well understand that any update or communication will never alleviate the frustration of those that are sitting in traffic and having to alter their schedules. We know that. but feel the least we can do is communicate as we have been.
For a faster response email [email protected]
[TLS]
This is really not ok that I have to drive my kid 6 miles to school! Get rid of courtesy busing until all mandated bus routes are filled!
Thank you for doing your best on behalf of all of us. You did not create this situation, and we appreciate so much that you took on the task of sorting this out. Yasher Koach!
Please use ALL my mandated money for my children’s routes and not try to get a bargain price that will cover some non mandated kids. If the bus company had ALL my mandated money maybe the route would be more profitable for the bus company.
what i don’t understand is that my son had busing home the 1st week of school and now the past 2 weeks there is none. What happened and when will it be fixed. I have emailed the LSTA many times with no reply.
Keep up the great work!
And what about the Lakewood Board of Ed busses? Can’t they be utilized to help the situation?
Thank you for the update and no it does not help us mothers who are carpooling. I calculated I am losing two hours a week of pay from my job because I come to work a half hour late everyday after taking my kids to school. We now got a letter from the school that if we pay hundreds of dollars they will get us private transportation. In all fairness every child in Lakewood should have to pay an equal amount to cover private transportation for those of us who do not have transportation. We are entitled to free transportation just as much as the students that were lucky enough to get transportation.
correction – carpooling mother
Who pushed for this Bill? Was it voted on? It was supposed to create additional busing for people living in courtesy areas. It SHOULD NOT hurt the people who are supposed to get MANDATORY busing and having little children walk over 10 min. across streets to get their bus stop – if they even get the busing???
Why couldn’t the children who needed courtesy busing pay for it themselves? There would be plenty of busing for other children and if they want the luxury of busing, pay for it – don’t take it out of the children who get mandatory busing pocket !!!
FACT My 3 mandated kids do not have bussing.
FACT 2 Of them had bussing last year
Fact: LSTA has a some good excuses.
Fact: Bigger, better funded schools got all/most their bussing.
Fact: Entire neighborhoods have been extremely under served (Read: Raintree)
Fact: Lakewood BOE has some 30+ buses sitting in their lot at 8:30am and then again at 4:30pm.
Fact: Picking one school over another is unfair if it wasn’t done through a gorel. All schools should have the same rights to bussing as the big boys.
Fact:
Fact my mandated students don’t have busing because their buses are being used for courtesy students
So what’s the update? Time lines?
just curious why some schools were serviced before others? We all know the answer
I would like to get aid in lieu for September and October. How do I go about this?
For all those complaining that they don’t have mandatory bussing it has nothing to do with the LSTA it has to do with the vendors who feel it’s not profitable to take your child’s route!!!
This is not LSTA alone. Where is Lakewood Township in all of this – there are idle, brand-new busses under owndership by the Lakewood Board of Education. These busses MUST BE UTILIZED for the currently unserved students of Lakewood at LEAST as a stopgap measure. Who paid for these overpriced buses? We did, as taxpayers.
they should not even let the courtesy roots be bid on until all mandatory is filed
Fac: my child had no bussing under the BOE. Fact: my child still has no bussing. So what was fixed by the transition? When the BOE threatened to pull bussing from nonmandated students, we all protested by sitting in traffic for 2 days. Now many mandated students have no bussing and nobody cares. Because the big schools have? This reeks.
Hopefully there won’t be buses stopping every other house to pick children up in my neighborhood, there is NO reason a bus should be stopping at each individual house to pick up and drop off children, there should be a centralized bus stop in each neighborhood! I’m sure that adds a substantial amount of time to each route as apposed to the bus just picking up everyone in one shot.
Mark you are 100% correct but the mandated routes should have been bid on first and only then should the non mandated routes be bid on. So the kid who lives close to his school (you know who’s kid) gets bussing while the kids that live 5 miles or more from that same school are carpooling!!!! And yes the bigger schools did get bussing but for some reason in my neighborhood (Central Ave area) Only Bais Faiga and the Cheder gave up stops everyone else has the same stops as last year. This means my kid has to get to a bus stop 1/2 mile from my house twice a day. Let the non mandated children pay for bussing and give us back our bussing. Fair is Fair!!!!!
To Mark
the reason the mandated busing is not profitable is because they are offering the same amount per child near or far. The LSTA should’ve figured this out in advance and offered more for mandatory than the courtesy. Also this whole new system was to figure out funding for all students to have busing. Are they saying the shortage of buses and drivers was a big shock to them? If they knew there was a shortage then they should not have taken the money for mandatory busing and used it for courtesy until they knew they had enough buses to do so. Sounds like there was some sort of plan to make sure certain schools have buses for ALL their students leaving the rest of us to sit in traffic all day driving our kids to school. I can’t see any other explanation for this. And now I hear some schools are asking the parents to pay for private transportation. I can’t believe it. That should be a shared expense for the whole town busing or no busing. Really frustrating!
I appreciate the tireless work from the new LSTA
if this situation stays, can LSTA please at least in January restructure and provide busses for those who did not get the first half of the year. 3 months to arrange this should be enough time. I feel this is at least the minimum that can be done.
Just saying “I feel your frustration” wouldn’t suffice. From us who are entitled to mandated something more concrete must be done. otherwise who needs the new Bill.
You mentioned in the article and I quote “f- Fact- minimizing our stops have translated into getting more kids on buses despite dealing with the shortage of buses and drivers”
I find that a little amusing you see I have spoken to the kids in public school guess what every single one of them have busing even those that didn’t last year and furthermore they all have independent stops!!!!
so I am curios!. why do they all have busing? 2. why does each kid need there own stop?
Well go figure, courtesy routes are more profitable than non courtesy, what a shocker. Mandated parents also have to drive there kids through a lot more traffic to get them to school.
The BOE is not going to do private schools ,because the LSTA got all the money for thoese schools from Trenton. This is what the private schools wanted
These same solutions that people suggest now, one stop per neighborhood, no house stops more kids on buses, have been suggested by the vendors for years and always ngot a negaative return for the schools.
I don’t understand why my son does not have bus @4:45. I have read repeatedly that there are many buses available for the 4:45 run?!
To annon at 4:38 when I was growing up in Brooklyn on my corner was a bus stop where they filled nearly an entire bus for one school. Grouping stops makes a lot of sense. But 1/2 mile away from home makes zero sense. Maybe if westgater put all the pickups in the shopping center would it make sense
now that not all mandatory children have bussing, they should reroute all the routes excluding the courtesy children , which will force the vendors to pick up all mandatory childern
instead of giving us the numbers of how many students have bussing. How about some percentages of how many mandated kids have bussing and how many courtesy kids have bussing.
I’m guessing that the numbers are quite telling.
There is no reason that mandated routes shouldn’t have been put on the bidding table first, before bringing the courtesy routes to the vendors attention.
People should realize even if pple live within 2 miles of school it can take longer to drive them than living 4 miles from school. My kids have no bus, we live a drop less than 2 miles from my kids school and it can take 35 to 40 minutes to get back and forth, due to traffic.
Why doesn’t anyone else get it?
The REAL problem is that the routes are so pathetically designed that they are too long and the bus companies don’t want it. They only get paid per route, and the drivers and bus companies want to earn money too!
The routes need INTELLIGENT DESIGN AND COORDINATION. All the kids from the same area going to the same area should all be on 1 bus, not 12. THIS is the only way to make it work, not to have every bus pick up kids scattered all around Lakewood.
THIS was the whole point of the LSTA in the first place!
I agree with real trutb. My kids used to have normal sensible bus routes. Starting a out 2 years ago the routes became horrible and dont make sense.
To hello,
35 min Makes sense. I live 3.5 miles from my sons school and it take me over an hr.