Software problems and new personnel contributed to overcrowded buses, late arrivals and late drop-offs as school opened last week.
By: Michael Arges
Before students can benefit from the expanded technology and carefully chosen teachers of the East Windsor Regional School District, they must first get to school.
Issues from pickup places to extreme delays related to school busing were the focus of public comment at Monday’s school board meeting.
Some parents expressed concern about the unusual delays and confusion in the district’s program of school busing. Other parents expressed support to fill empty school bus seats by allowing parents to pay for school busing if their children are not eligible for free service.
A third busing question was whether or not school buses should be allowed to go into the Oakmont Terrace development off Dutch Neck Road for pick-ups rather than the present arrangement of picking up students on Dutch Neck Road. Oakmont Terrace residents both supporting and opposing the idea spoke at the public forum at Monday’s board meeting.
Some severe delays and confusion in the district’s busing program began on the first day of school, Sept. 6, and extended into the beginning of this week, school district business manager David Shafter noted in an interview Tuesday. The district was hit by a three-fold burden of software failure combined with a lack of experience at two key positions.
Software problems led to several parents not receiving bus passes soon enough and to an excess number of students assigned to some buses, Mr. Shafter noted. When there were too many students, buses stopped where they were until a van could come to transport the extra students. This led to significant delays of up to an hour or even more.
The software problem was exacerbated by the district’s need to rely on a new bus dispatcher and new assistant to the transportation supervisor, Mr. Shafter added.
"The assistant has been on the job for about eight months this is his first opening of school," Mr. Shafter said. "The dispatcher has been on the job for about two or three weeks."
More experienced staff might have caught the software problem before it became a major problem, Mr. Shafter suggested.
"We lost two very experienced people, who probably knew to look at things from doing it year after year," he said.
School staff are still puzzled about the software problem that was the root of the mess.
"This is a software (program) that we’ve been using," Mr. Shafter said. "I don’t know how it happened, but somehow a glitch got in there."
The severity of the problem was underlined by parent Lisa Kollman of Franklin Street. Somehow in all the confusion there were no teachers or volunteers to greet her 5-year-old son when he arrived for his first day of kindergarten.
"Somehow, some way my son got lost," she said. "He decided to take it upon himself to walk into the upper grade levels and find his way back."
With regard to the second busing issue, the school board is moving ahead to assess the feasibility of offering subscription bus service for children not eligible for free busing. Parents speaking at Monday’s public forum urged the district to go forward with such a plan for the sake of parents’ work schedules and students’ safety.
The district will be contacting parents of children not eligible for free service to see if they would subscribe to a paid service. According to state mandates, elementary students living more than two miles from school are eligible for free busing. Middle school and high school students living more than two-and-a-half miles away are also eligible for free service.
A student is also eligible for free service if the route they would take to school has been deemed unsafe by the school district. Hightstown and East Windsor did an assessment of dangerous routes for the district about six or seven years ago, district officials said. The district provides bus service for about 79 percent of its approximately 4,679 students.
District leaders want to keep this idea on the fast track because they do recognize that there are some students that have a long distance to walk, Chief School Administrator Dr. David Witmer noted at Monday’s meeting. Some students may be taking short cuts that are unsafe or inappropriate, Dr. Witmer added.
"To get to school, many of them are walking through private property," Dr. Witmer said, "or walking through other areas that are less than desirable or unsafe routes."

