The Jackson School District this evening announced, that after working tirelessly to try and secure busing for nonpublic Lakewood transportation, most private school children will not be receiving District busing.
The following letter was issued by Business Administrator/Board Secretary Ms. Michelle Richardson:
Dear Parents,
This is the update as promised last week. We met with all available Lakewood Nonpublic School Administrators today and explained the process we have been through together. Unfortunately, even after all the work required to put the route packages together, NONE of the 3 bidders who picked up a package chose to bid on our nonpublic routes to Lakewood private schools.
In future years, we will start this process earlier and be able to put the bid out at least twice. For this year, we are not in a position to put this out to bid a second time because we would not meet the mandated August I deadline of letting you know what is happening with your student’s transportation.
As you may know, Jackson and districts throughout the state are experiencing a drastic shortage of bus drivers, which severely limits our options. We are a large district and can only run a certain amount of routes. As we fine tune our routing for this coming school year, we will continue to look to find drivers for some of our non-public students. As we work toward this goal, we are asking for another
week of your patience as we complete this process. We will inform you next week if we have success doing that.
However, we do need to inform parents who are sending to the schools below (in addition to the other schools we released in the last two letters) that they should expect Al L (and not district transportation), if eligible to receive it:
Yeshiva Tifereth Torah
Tashbar School
Yeshiva Ohr Yehuda
Bnos Esther Malka
Lakewood Cheder School
Yeshiva Even Yisroel
Bnos Bracha
We appreciate your patience as we navigate this process to do what is best for the children.
See below a video explaining the situation.
There is simple solution that I’d say would work. If all schools on oak street used the same bus. Jackson is large and it’s impossible to accommodate buses for every school
to Shlep all over . But if a few buses each goes to one neighborhood in Jackson and drives up oak street, the route is shorter and more practical. I never understand why schools can’t share buses.
They actually do. My daughters’ (school on Oak Street) used to share with another school, then the busses got too full to the point that one bus is not enough b”H now even just our school.
I think we should all enroll our children in public school. They will find the bus drivers very quickly!
My child attends a private school catholic and I would love for them not to give us jays bus service .. worst bus company ever ..
Reply to comment above enroll in publicly school ? Years back they were going to make kids start walking within a certain distance bc of bussing issues the town was having .. enroll and they will walk .. Jackson already had plenty of kids who do not use or have a bus and go to public schools
@practical, lsta would love to do that in lkwd too! Would save our kids sitting on the bus for hours!!!