JACKSON – The four schoolchildren of a township mother are dismissed from their private school in Lakewood at four different times — meaning she makes four separate pick-ups every afternoon school is in session, plus the morning drop-off.

It wasn’t that long ago — last year, in fact — that her children would simply take a school bus from their Jackson home to school, one of the largest serving the Orthodox Jewish community, and back home again. 

But this year, the school district — reeling from the effects of a nationwide shortage of bus drivers, state funding cuts and a steep rise in the number of children attending private schools — let the mother know that there was no school bus for her kids.

She was on her own.

“This wasn’t out of the blue,” said the mother, who now spends on average three hours in traffic daily. “It’s not like they didn’t see this coming.” 

Hers are among more than 3,000 nonpublic students in Jackson whose parents have been tasked with finding alternative transportation, as the district is confronted with a peculiar set of circumstances, some of it the product of scarcity years in the making.

The number of nonpublic school students, driven in part by a booming Orthodox Jewish community, has grown sevenfold in the last seven school years, and more than doubled in the last two school years, according to district records.

The public school district is charged with getting those nonpublic children to their schools — just as they are obliged to get almost all township children to school.

But those private schools are almost exclusively located in Lakewood, and developers are barred from constructing any new schools in Jackson — including those for its growing Orthodox Jewish community.

School district officials have acknowledged they can’t keep up. 

Related: Jackson, other districts face rising bus costs

“We went through the process we’re required to do. We tried to see if we could bus these students and, in the past, we could,” Superintendent Nicole Pormilli said. “But with the driver shortage, we don’t have the ability to put any nonpublic students on our Jackson buses. We don’t have anyone picking up the bids. We can’t do it in house.”

She said cutting off transportation to nonpublic students was the district’s only option.

The Jackson school district serves about 7,500 students in public schools and provides transportation for 7,300 students, including public school students and those attending vocational academies and special education students placed out of district.

But under state law, the district is required to also provide transportation for the 3,125 students living in Jackson who attend 139 different private schools elsewhere, according to district records.

State law only requires transportation to be provided to a nonpublic school if the student lives less than 30 miles away.

More than 89% of the district’s nonpublic school students attend Orthodox Jewish schools, mostly in Lakewood, the records show.

Until this year, the school district had always been able to provide transportation for at least some of its nonpublic school children — a decreasingly small percentage of them, down to one-third last year.

And since 2014-15, the district’s transportation budget has grown 38% — from $8.7 million to over $12.1 million. During the same time period, the number of students compensated by the district for nonpublic school transportation — known as “aid in lieu” — has skyrocketed from just 160 to more than 3,000. 

Under state law, the district must compensate parents $1,000 for each child, “aid-in-lieu” payments designed to be used to pay for alternative transportation or, in some cases, the fuel and repairs that come with driving back and forth between Jackson and Lakewood multiple times per day. 

The number of students’ families receiving aid-in-lieu payments has nearly quadrupled since 2019-20, when 776 students received payments. And since 2014-15, the number of aid-in-lieu students has increased from just 160 to the more than 3,000 receiving aid-in-lieu this year.

The district’s 2021-22 budget appropriated more than $1.3 million in aid in lieu payments. In 2017-18, it appropriated less than $590,000.

‘Mess of a situation’

So what changed this year? 

First, there was a historic spike in the number of nonpublic school children, which jumped from 1,946 to 3,125 in the span of one year. While the number of such students has increased every year since 2015, its upticks have usually hovered between 12% and 36% — not 60%, as occurred this year.

Tzvi Herman, a Jackson school board member, believes the spike is due to an  increasing number of homes being sold to Orthodox Jewish families moving to Jackson — not just this year, but in previous years.

“I have three kids, but only one kid currently in school,” said Herman, who emphasized he was only speaking for himself, not the board. “As the existing families get older, all those kids come ‘online’ and start to attend school.”

Herman, the only Orthodox Jewish member of the school board, estimated that more than 400 homes were sold to Orthodox Jewish families this year alone. 

“A lot of these people haven’t even moved in yet,” said Herman, who is seeking re-election to a full term on the school board this year.

At the same time, Jackson — like districts nationwide — has been facing a shortage of bus drivers coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

From 2008 to 2020, the number of drivers in New Jersey with an “S” endorsement — required to drive a school bus with children on board — dropped from over 90,000 to less than 33,000.

Many bus drivers have chosen to simply retire rather than return to the grind of a front-line job that pays as little as $14 per hour during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In an October 2020 poll in School Transportation News, 90% of respondents reported that they’d faced a shortage of bus drivers.

And while the district’s total transportation costs breached $12 million for the first time in its 2021-22 budget, changes to the state school funding formula has cut more than $11 million in aid since the 2018-19 school year, including $4.3 million this year and another $7.4 million through 2024-25.

Districts like Jackson have decried the new “S2” formula, which went into effect in 2018, as ignoring the strains of a large nonpublic school population — similar to complaints heard for years in Lakewood. In neighboring Toms River, for example, state aid was cut another $8 million this year.

Relatred: Coalition of NJ school districts vow to fight S2 school funding formula

This year, the district is paying aid-in-lieu to the families of 2,100 students and providing transportation to another 500, Toms River district business administrator Bill Doering said.

That formula gives district aid based only on its public school students. It doesn’t take into account districts like Jackson, charged with transporting thousands of children to nonpublic schools. 

“We’re in this mess of a situation where I don’t believe the funding isn’t adequate for this type of unique district with a unique need,” Pormilli said.

How they’re handling it

About 900 Jackson nonpublic school children will ride school buses through the Lakewood Student Transportation Authority, a separate authority that handles school busing — mostly by contracting with private bus operators — for an estimated 50,000 Lakewood students who attend private schools in the township, where more than two-thirds of the population are believed to be Orthodox Jews.

LSTA director Avraham Krawiec said about 300 to 400 children would be served on existing routes between Toms River and Lakewood that already pass through Jackson.

The LSTA already transports about 2,500 children from Toms River to Lakewood private schools, Krawiec said, including students who receive aid-in-lieu and those who live beyond the 30-mile limit.

Another 500 children would likely ride buses that stop at multiple schools in the same area, such as Oak Street — where five schools with hundreds students from multiple northern Ocean County towns are within walking distance of each other.

Pormilli said the district had conversations with LSTA officials about partnering to serve Jackson’s nonpublic school children earlier this year, but those conversations were “not something that was going to be efficient for us.

“It’s not off the table, it’s just not a fit for us right now,” she said. 

Investigation: Some NJ private school bus operators leave your kids in danger — and get away with it

Krawiec suggested the two entities find common ground next year: “It’s better for Jackson to work with us. If there’s an existing infrastructure,” he said. “it makes sense to use it as opposed to starting from scratch.” 

For parents of the rest of the stranded students, options are few and far between. Some have pooled together resources with neighbors and other families attending the same school to hire private transportation. 

Others have simply begun driving their children themselves.

The flood of extra cars on the road has led to reports of increased traffic around the Jackson-Lakewood border. Some schools have even had to alter their drop-off and pick-up procedures because their driveways are designed for a few buses, not dozens of cars. 

“If you have 50 cars taking 50 kids to school, a lot of the schools don’t have the capability to handle them,” said Herman, the Jackson school board member.

Jackson Police Capt. Steven Laskiewicz, a department spokesman, said the area had seen a gradual traffic increase over the last decade but did not answer questions about any specific increase this school year.

By not providing busing to its nonpublic school children, there’s been a trickle-down effect on the schools themselves, Herman said.

More than half of the students at Nachlas Bais Yaakov, Herman’s daughter’s school, live in Jackson or Toms River, he said. The influx of cars alone — trying to squeeze into a small, round driveway meant to handle a few school buses — required the school to stagger its dismissal times. 

“The schools are taking the brunt of it,” Herman said. 

The Jackson mother who drives to her children’s school four times each afternoon estimated she spends three hours in traffic each day.

She spoke on the condition of anonymity out of a fear that, if bus seats become available, her children would be left off. 

When asked how she’s handling it, she simply says: “I’m not,” and jokes that she should just buy an RV and camp out at the school.

Looking forward

Herman, 32, is the first Orthodox Jew elected to office in the town and ran on a campaign that, in part, highlighted the district’s issues with transporting nonpublic students.

He doesn’t expect the issue to go away anytime soon: “All the schools are in Lakewood,” Herman said. 

It’s not for lack of trying: Developers, Orthodox Jewish activists and federal and state prosecutors have filed discrimination lawsuits against Jackson Township after its council passed a series of ordinances that banned the construction of any new schools or dormitories. (At some Jewish schools, students live on campus to avoid secular distractions.)

In its lawsuit, the Department of Justice accused the town of caving into the demands of “anti-Orthodox” hostility. Township officials have denied any wrongdoing and have engaged in settlement talks.

More:Where the discrimination lawsuits against Jackson NJ stand

Now, the dearth of those schools has been a leading cause of the district’s transportation issues, Herman said. 

“No one wants to have their kids travel into Lakewood, with all the traffic, and get to school an hour later,” Herman said. “But until we have schools in Jackson, I don’t know if we’ll be able to solve the problem.

“We’re really dealing with uncharted territory.” 

Those ordinances have been the subject of wide-ranging civil rights lawsuits filed against the township by the U.S. Department of Justice, New Jersey Attorney General, Orthodox Jewish advocacy group Agudath Israel and developers looking to build a school in Jackson.

A federal judge in the Agudath Israel lawsuit granted a preliminary injunction that serves to overturn the ordinances, but the case is still pending. 

Pormilli is hopeful the district will be able to begin busing at least some non-public school students again in the 2022-23 school year.

The district will go out to bid earlier in the year, she said, and is holding out hope that more bus drivers will be looking for work. 

“It’s a very unique year,” she said.

But even with more resources, the district expects the number of non-public school kids to keep rising. Officials keep track of housing developments and how many are purchased by families with school-age children.

“We’re anticipating some increases moving forward but we’re not sure what that looks like right now,” she said. 

Instead, Pormilli hopes legislators will hear the cries of districts like Jackson and offer up a funding solution.

With more state aid, the district would have more incentive to offer potential bus drivers or contractors to take on new routes.

“We are always advocating for something that helps these types of districts, these unique situations where the increases are going to continue,” Pormilli said.

Mike Davis has spent the last decade covering New Jersey local news, marijuana legalization, transportation and basically whatever else is going on at any given moment. Contact him at [email protected] or @byMikeDavis on Twitter.

Source: Asbury Park

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