School district launches its first pay-to-ride the bus service

29 students sign up at $465 each for the year

By: John Tredrea
   The Hopewell Valley Regional School District is providing school bus service to 29 children whose families are paying for it because they are not entitled to busing under school district policy or state law.
   The district is charging $465 per child under this program, which is called subscription busing.
   Schools Superintendent Judith Ferguson said the average cost of busing a student in this district is $500 per year. That was pro-rated to $465 for subscription busing, since that service did not become available until school had been in session about two weeks, she said.
   As of Tuesday morning, 17 of the children using subscription busing attend Stony Brook Elementary School, on Stephenson Road in the Brandon Farms development in southeastern Hopewell Township. The district has hired a bus, for $48 per day, specifically to transport these children.
   That $48 is extremely close, the superintendent said, to the amount the families using the bus are paying for the subscription service.
   "Four hundred and sixty-five dollars a year breaks down to $2.74 per day per child for bus service," she said. "Collecting $2.74 per day from 17 students yields $46.56."
   In addition to the 17 students going to Stony Brook on the bus the district has hired for $48 per day, the district is providing subscription bus service to two students of Hopewell Elementary School, in Hopewell Borough, and 10 students at a pre-school program at Bear Tavern Elementary.
   Students in preschool programs have never been entitled to bus service. Unlike the 17 Stony Brook students, the two Hopewell Elementary students and 10 pre-school students are riding on regular school bus runs rather than on a bus provided strictly for subscription busing.
   Families learned of the subscription bus service on a recent post card from the superintendent.
   One critic of the program, Stony Brook parent Bob Giangrosso of Chicory Lane, termed the opportunity to pay $465 to bus each of his three children "adding insult to injury."
   "We’re not using the subscription bus service," he said. "My wife and I have twins in first grade and another child in third grade. Busing them all would cost us nearly $1,500 this year. We can’t afford that."
   Mr. Giangrosso said his main objection continues to be that busing service was discontinued for his children in the first place.
   "I don’t think the term courtesy busing can be applied realistically here at all," he said. "We live 1.9 miles from the school. My wife and I don’t think our children, who obviously are quite young, would be safe walking that distance to school. To say they would be makes no sense to me."
   He said he and his wife drive their children to school and pick them up each day. As other parents have, he noted that the drop-off and pickup traffic at school is considerably worse during inclement weather. Tuesday was a rainy day. "It’s going to be unbelievable down there today," Mr. Giangrosso ruefully said about a half-hour before school was due to close Tuesday afternoon.
   During the 2006-2006 school year, when the school board decided to eliminate courtesy busing from the Brandon Farms and Penn View developments (Penn View is a much smaller development near Pennington), school officials said they would offer parents who still wanted busing the opportunity to pay for it.
   With the term courtesy busing, school officials refer to busing for students whose walk to school is considered safe. A number of Brandon Farms parents have protested publicly that, in their view, the walk to school from their residences is not safe for their children.
   At Monday night’s school board meeting, John Nemeth, board secretary and school district business administrator, said the district received two bids to do the subscription bus route in Brandon Farms. In addition to the $48 bid the district accepted, there was a bid for $251.
   Mr. Nemeth explained the wide disparity in the bids. He said the $48 bid came from a firm that already has contracted bus routes with the district and was able to send a bus to the subscription bus run after that bus did a run for Central High School, which starts school about an hour earlier than the elementary schools. Use of this technique is an example of "two-tiered busing," Mr. Nemeth said.
   Dr. Ferguson said the bus being used in Brandon Farms for the subscription service is a full-size 54-passenger bus. The other available size holds about 20 students, she said, and using it would save only a few dollars.
   "Most of what we’re paying goes for the driver," she said, adding that contracting for the larger bus means the district will have seats immediately available if more families decide to use the subscription bus service.
   Under state law, school districts are only required to bus elementary students who live more than two miles from school and secondary students who live more than two and a half miles away. These students thus receive what is known as mandated busing.
   Nonmandated busing – i.e., not required by state law — is of two types in the parlance of school transportation policy. Nonmandated courtesy busing, such as that which has been discontinued in Brandon Farms, is given to students whose walk to school is considered safe by school officials. Nonmandated hazardous busing is given to students whose walk is considered dangerous.
   In addition to the 200-plus students who have lost courtesy busing this year, the school board has said it plans to eliminate nonmandated hazardous busing to an estimated 822 students next year. The only students who would continue to get busing from the district are those entitled under the state law that addresses how far they live from school.
   Also under state law, the Valley’s three municipal governments can pay for the busing the school district has said it will discontinue. Those municipal governments are conferring on that issue now.
   Anyone interested in inquiring about subscription busing should call the school district’s administrative headquarters at 737-4000. That headquarters is at 425 S. Main St. in Pennington.