Procrastination puts 85 kids on wait list for bus
By Joanne Degnan, Managing Editor
ALLENTOWN — In an attempt to find bus seats for 85 students whose parents missed the application deadline for subscription busing, the school district is offering to waive high school parking permit fees and middle school activity fees for students who give up bus seats they aren’t using.
At the Sept. 5 Upper Freehold Regional Board of Education meeting, board members decided against seeking emergency bids the next day for a new three-tier bus run to accommodate the elementary, middle school and high school students whose parents did not submit their paperwork and $150 deposit by Aug. 14.
This decision to see if financial incentives could free up seats, instead of the more costly option of adding a new bus route, means that most wait-listed students won’t have their transportation problem resolved until after Sept. 19.
Elementary and middle school students who live more than two miles from school and high school students who live more than 2.5 miles from school are legally entitled to free bus seats. The families of children who don’t meet this mileage criteria can pay $300 per student for the district’s subscription busing service.
Business Administrator Diana Schiraldi told the school board that immediately adding a three-tier bus route serving all three schools now when the rest of the bus contracts already have been awarded would likely cost the district about $44,000. Subscription fees would only cover about half of that expense.
Board members said it made more economic sense to take the time to see if students who are legally entitled to bus service, but not riding the bus, would waive transportation this year so their empty seats could go to wait-listed students.
To that end, the district will waive the $50 student parking fee at Allentown High School or deduct $50 from the $120 high school activity fee for AHS students who qualify for free busing and agree to give up their seat. Stone Bridge students who give up bus seats can have their entire $45 middle school activity fee waived.
Even if the financial incentives fail to produce all of the 85 needed bus seats, the effort may still free up enough space on existing routes to make adding a new bus route less costly. For example, if enough high school students waive transportation, the new route could be bid as a single- or double-tier route serving only one or two schools, instead of all three district schools.
The subscription busing application deadline was June 8 and the district stopped processing late applications Aug. 14.
Board of Education President Lisa Herzer said parents who didn’t return applications on time need to understand the difficult situation they’ve created for the district as well as the parents of other bus riders.
”There has to be deadlines because there are certain things that need to happen,” Mrs. Herzer said.
Routes need to be created based on where the bus riders live, transportation contracts need to be put out to bid and awarded to private companies, and finally, parents must be notified by mail about the bus routes and pickup times, she said. When the parents of 85 students wait until two weeks before school starts to ask for a bus seat, it creates chaos, she said.
”By people putting this off, they are affecting other people whose bus times are now going to change because of adding new pickups … so there has to be deadlines,” Mrs. Herzer said.
Upper Freehold Regional transportation operations are overseen by the Millstone School District under a shared service agreement. The Millstone transportation office has been accommodating as possible in the face of the last-minute UFRSD subscription busing requests, Ms. Schiraldi said, but the situation has been frustrating for both districts.
Last year, 223 Allentown and Upper Freehold students used subscription busing. This year, only 122 student applications arrived by Aug. 14.
At last week’s board meeting, administrators said they were puzzled as to why so many parents missed the deadline despite phone, email and text messages that the district sent on May 1. A notice about the 2012-2013 busing application deadlines had also been on the district’s website since March.
”A lot of people are telling us that they were under the impression that if they were a subscription bus rider in the previous year they would automatically be brought forward,” Superintendent Richard Fitzpatrick told the school board.
However, the district has never automatically re-enrolled bus riders in the three years that the subscription busing program has existed, Dr. Fitzpatrick said.
”I don’t think we should assume that they’re going to re-subscribe,” Ms. Schiraldi said. “Circumstances can change, and this is first-come first-served.”
School board member Eileen Heddy said she thought that in the future the district should send out a reminder notice “closer to the deadline” to remind parents. A May 1 email about a June 8 deadline may be too far in advance, she said.
Mrs. Heddy also speculated that some parents might have delayed sending in their subscription busing applications because of the uncertainty last spring about the new practice times for the middle school band program.
”I was one of the people that didn’t hand my money in because I was waiting to see what happened with band,” said Ms. Heddy, an Allentown resident who has two children in the district. “And I wasn’t going to pay $600 to have my kids bused to school and then still have to drive them every single morning.”
Mrs. Herzer said parents of students transitioning to new schools within in the district might have not realized that their children would no longer qualify for free busing. In the future, the district needs to do a better job communicating this information to parents, she said.
”Where I think we lacked was in the eighth to ninth grade (transition),” Mrs. Herzer said. “Because it goes from two miles to two and half miles so unless someone had a high school kid already they would not know that. I think we have to take a responsibility for that, but it was probably only a handful of people affected.”

