I wrote today at WHYY on Lakewood Public Schools’ fiscal insolvency, a problem largely due the cost of busing 25,000 private day school students to Orthodox Jewish yeshivas. There’s another article in today’s Asbury Park Press which details the strains of transportation on the district, where the 4,800 attending public school students (mostly Hispanic and mostly poor) are given short-shrift by a school board beholden to the Jewish community. Cost this year for busing is over $21 million, a fifth of the total operating budget, including $6.8 million to bus 10,000 yeshiva students to schools within two miles of their homes under the policy of “courtesy busing.”
Perhaps no issue reflects the divide in town as much as the cost and necessity of courtesy busing — and that division is reflected on the school board.
On Aug. 29, Board President Carl Fink got into a heated verbal exchange with board members Zechariah Greenspan and Yisrael Friedman over requesting that their own children receive front-door service from the school bus.
Fink, saying he was confident that he would not be re-elected because his views were unpopular in the township’s Jewish community — a powerful voting bloc — told Friedman and Greenspan that “the amount of children that get busing for nonpublic schools that live a block away is disgraceful. We did away with house stops. Now you two gentlemen, who are on the board, asked (the district) to make house stops. Shame on you.”
The room burst out in applause.
What Fink was objecting to was Friedman and Greenspan requesting that an exception be made so that their children would be picked up at their house — a practice the board had banned for the rest of the township.
1 Comment