A Week of Busing Bombshells, Budget Battles, Backtracking, and Bargaining

  Reuvain Borchardt

By now, anyone in Lakewood who isn’t living under a rock knows about the whirlwind week we’ve just had on the transportation front. Just days before the start of the school year, the LSTA announced that the fee for courtesy busing—originally set at $385—had spiked to $945, the result of a lost township subsidy tied to a cut in state funding. Outrage, anger, fear, and despair ensued. The Igud Hamosdos urged schools to tell their non-mandated students not to opt in to courtesy busing at all. Days later, the LSTA reversed course, resetting the price at $675.

The week came with generous helpings of speculation, indignation, and bloviation, but behind the noise is a genuinely complicated story running through several layers of government—one that ultimately lands on parents just trying to figure out how their kids are getting to school. The Voice spoke with the key players in this saga—from the past week and from the past decade—to lay out what happened, why, and to look ahead to what the future holds for busing Central Jersey students to school.

This is not just a story about one week. It’s the latest chapter in a saga that goes back to at least 2016, when the LSTA was created to solve exactly this problem: getting as many Lakewood kids to school as possible as affordably as possible.

 

Busing rules and regs in the Garden State

 

Under New Jersey law, all public and private school students get free busing if they live at least two miles from their elementary school or 2.51 miles from their high school. These are mandated students, funded through a mix of state and school-district money. Students living closer—non-mandated—are entitled to nothing.

If a mandated private-school student can’t be placed on a route—say, no bus company wants it or they live too far from other riders—their parents get a fixed aid-in-lieu payment to cover their own transportation.

Some school districts bus non-mandated students who pay for the route themselves. But low-income districts like Lakewood are barred from charging for services, so for decades, the Lakewood Board of Ed simply funded non-mandated busing, also known as courtesy busing, in full.

That changed when the BoE fell into debt, due largely to a state education-funding formula skewed against districts with lots of kids in private school. In 2016, a state monitor overseeing the BoE’s finances ruled that the district could no longer fund non-mandated busing, although it remained legally barred from charging for it. Thousands of kids stood to lose bus service entirely, left to hitch rides, carpool, or miss school. This was a prospect desired by no one.

So a group of community leaders devised a fix, later passed into law in Trenton: a new entity called the Lakewood Student Transportation Authority. Under this model, Lakewood’s private-school community would be treated as one aid-in-lieu district. Each mandated student’s aid-in-lieu amount—$884 at the time, by now risen to $1,177—would go into a shared pot administered by the LSTA, which would use it to bus mandated students as cheaply as possible, with companies bidding on routes. Leftover funds would go toward busing non-mandated students, who at the time made up more than a third of Lakewood’s student body.

That leftover money wasn’t enough to bus non-mandated kids for free, so the gap was covered by a township subsidy plus a fee on parents.

Growing pains

 

In the years since, the yeshivah community in Central Jersey has undergone marked changes. The number of schools and students have grown exponentially, and the community has spread into nearby towns like Jackson, Toms River, and Howell, whose private-school students the LSTA has also taken on. Only Lakewood’s non-mandated students get subsidized, since Lakewood is the only township that provides a subsidy; non-mandated students from the other towns pay the full $1,177 (plus a $95 administrative fee).

The share of non-mandated Lakewood students using courtesy busing is now under 20 percent of the LSTA’s total ridership.

Parents also gripe about late buses, missed stops, or pickups so early that kids lose sleep—a byproduct, LSTA defenders say, of how many students and schools Lakewood’s routes now serve.

But the courtesy busing-funding formula itself has stayed largely intact. With this year’s fee set at $385 (up slightly from last year’s $370), more than 75 percent of non-mandated Lakewood students—10,622, to be exact—had opted in for the coming year.

And then, just days before school started, the wheels came off.

Township budget woes…

 

As we’ve documented in recent weeks, Lakewood Township has been battling budget woes driven by the state’s funding formula for municipalities and worsened this year by a few costly surprises.

State aid to municipalities runs on a formula last updated decades ago, when Lakewood had a third of its current population. Under that formula, Lakewood—now the state’s fourth-largest municipality—gets just $5 million a year from Trenton, while Elizabeth, the fifth largest, gets $29 million.

During his last three years in office, former Governor Phil Murphy, recognizing the shortfall, gave Lakewood an extra $7–8 million annually, plus a $2 million security grant to BMG. This year, the first of Governor Mikie Sherrill’s term, the additional funds were cut to $1 million, plus the BMG grant.

Some, including Mayor Ray Coles, see the cut as political payback from a governor whom Lakewood gave less than 10 percent of its vote.

“That’s my gut feeling,” Coles told The Voice in a previous interview, though “I can’t prove it.”

Others, speaking on condition of anonymity, voiced similar suspicions. In a separate interview for this article, Coles was more circumspect, declining to say anything critical of Sherrill “right now because we’re still hoping beyond hope” that she’ll increase the funding.

Others call that reading unfair, considering that Murphy’s special grants came from federal Covid money required to be appropriated by last year.

“Even if Murphy had remained in office,” says Shlomo Schorr, director of Agudath Israel’s New Jersey office, “there’s no guarantee that Lakewood would have gotten that grant again.”

With the Covid money gone, Schorr says, Sherrill “zeroed out all additional funding.” During budget discussions, he says, administration officials expressed “genuine bewilderment as to how we weren’t thrilled with the amount we received.”

“The way some in the administration see it,” says Schorr, “of the 564 municipalities in the state, Lakewood received the seventh-highest amount of additional operating funds in the fiscal year 2027 state budget. And if you include the $2 million for BMG, Lakewood is third.”

Others would argue that Lakewood indeed deserves to get a larger grant to make up for the inequitable state funding formula, though the Sherrill administration could counter that the formula is a legislative matter that requires a legislative fix and that patchwork fixes cannot all be laid at her feet.

…And rising costs

 

“Our expenses have gone through the roof,” Coles says. “Fuel prices: Can you imagine how much you and I are paying extra for gas this year, how much more we’re paying for police and garbage trucks? Health insurance has gone crazy. Utility costs have gone crazy. All this stuff conspired to put us into a very bad fiscal spot.”

Whatever the cause and whomever you might blame, the Township’s budget is a genuine mess, worsened by a record-setting snowfall last winter that cost $8 million to clean up. (The Township had hoped to recoup $6.5 million of that from FEMA, but—in another case of alleged political payback—the Trump administration denied snow-recovery funds to New Jersey and three other blue states while granting them to six red ones.)

To make matters worse for Lakewood officials, the state also denied the township’s request to raise property taxes by $12.9 million.

So cuts had to be made—including the elimination of the $2.75 million subsidy the Township had been giving the LSTA for courtesy busing.

(The Township’s budget is in such bad shape that Coles told The Voice the busing subsidy would have been eliminated even if the tax hike had been approved. Another person with knowledge of local finances told The Voice that we may soon see the elimination of municipal trash pickup for shuls and yeshivos and a reduction in snow plowing.)

The Thursday bombshell

 

Last Thursday, seemingly out of nowhere for the 10,622 families who’d signed up for courtesy busing at $385, the LSTA sent a letter announcing that because of the lost Township subsidy, the price had jumped $560 to $945.

The reaction was swift and negative.

“There’s no way I’m signing up for that price,” said one mother, Shevy. “All my neighbors have decided to carpool. We carpool 30 percent of the time anyway because the buses aren’t reliable. They show up late or don’t show up at all.”

Aryeh, a father of six with five non-mandated kids, was looking at an extra $2,800—a total of $4,725.

“The neighbors have been calling all morning asking if we want to carpool this year,” he said. “Carpool is a pain in the neck. My wife and I have to be at work at 9:30. Our non-mandated kids go to three schools that are near each other but in the opposite direction of our workplaces. I’m not sure what I’m going to do. There are no good options.”

Tzippy, a mother of eight, felt carpooling “won’t save money” and that parents insisting they wouldn’t pay were mostly “reacting emotionally and will cave.”

“As frustrating as this is, it’s hard to point a finger here,” she said. “A state cut was made, and the money has got to come from somewhere.”

Committeeman Meir Lichtenstein expressed sadness over the turn of events.

“The LSTA legislation that we got passed and the ensuing busing, although far from perfect, helps thousands and thousands of our kids get to school,” he told The Voice. “It also allows for parents to get to work, yeshivah, appointments or whatever that day may bring, helps keep many cars off the bustling roads, and makes for much safer transportation of our precious children to school. Although this is non-mandated, we feel it proper to contribute financially and be active politically to allow this program to continue, especially when parents are already suffering the staggering costs of sending children to private school. It’s deeply disappointing that our funding was cut.”

The pushback

 

Some parents were simply outraged that the hike was announced this close to the school year.

But LSTA Director Rabbi Avraham Krawiec—who sat with The Voice for three interviews over the course of the week—says Township officials had been “exploring every opportunity” to preserve the funding and only gave him a final “no” the Tuesday before he announced the increase.

Others wondered why losing $2.75 million, which amounted to a $259 subsidy for each of the 10,622 kids getting courtesy busing, required raising the price for parents by $560.

Krawiec replies that he had to plan for a worst-case scenario: that up to half of courtesy-busing families might cancel once the price rose, driving up the per-student cost for everyone who remained. Worse, losing too many non-mandated riders off routes shared with mandated students could leave those routes too sparse for bus companies to run profitably—stranding mandated kids too and eliminating the leftover aid-in-lieu funds that subsidize non-mandated busing in the first place.

The Igud says no

 

On Friday afternoon came another pivotal letter—an email from the Igud Hamosdos to school administrators, advising them to tell parents that “the yeshivah feels that this is a cost that should be covered through government funding and shouldn’t be placed on the parents… Our recommendation is that parents not opt in to the non-mandated busing program at the new rate.” Many mosdos passed the message along that Erev Shabbos.

Then, on Monday, in another stunning turn, the Igud announced that “following meetings and discussions with the LSTA, our local and state government officials, and askanim, the additional non-mandated busing fee has been reduced to $290 per student”—bringing the total to $675—and recommended that parents opt in after all.

Thousands scrambled to sign up via the LSTA portal or in-person kiosks within a two-day window.

What happened over the weekend?

 

The initial letter from the Igud appears to have been a tactic to pressure the Township to find a way to come up with the money. After all, nobody wanted to see thousands of kids without busing, hitching and carpooling across town.

But you can’t pressure someone who genuinely doesn’t have the money, and by every account, the Township doesn’t. Nor did it promise any.

So how did the price drop from $560 to $290? And where will the remaining amount come from?

Essentially, askanim decided that the original number was unmanageable for parents, even if it was what the LSTA actually needed, and agreed to try to figure out some way to find the difference elsewhere.

“Apparently, the schools and the township got together, and they came to some sort of understanding that [the missing funds] will be procured via additional legislation,” Krawiec explains—vaguely, because the assurances he received were themselves vague.

Pressed for specifics on where the money would come from, he could only say it would come “via different funding streams, whether it’s the township or the state.”

Multiple officials who spoke on condition of anonymity confirmed that no firm source has been identified and that various fallback ideas were floated in case the hoped-for legislation or funding doesn’t materialize.

Krawiec says that once the officials got together and advised him to knock the price down to $675 and that they would come up with the remaining $290, regardless of whatever else happens, he will not be asking parents for more money this year.

“I’m not raising the fee,” he insists.

Asked what happens if the promised funding never comes, he says, “We’re going to work collaboratively with all the stakeholders”—but maintains, “we’re not raising the fee for this year.”

If nothing changes

 

What if this isn’t a one-year problem? What if the state never gives Lakewood a meaningful funding increase, the Township’s finances continue to decline, the subsidy is never restored, and courtesy busing stays far more expensive than it’s ever been—with thousands of students dropping out of the program?

Would that call the LSTA’s future into question?

“We’ll see,” Krawiec says.

But he notes that even at his originally proposed $945, non-mandated Lakewood families were still getting a deal: Leftover mandated-student funds knocked $232 off the full $1,177 out-of-town families pay.

And even that full price may be a bargain—parents without LSTA busing, like those in Manchester, pay $1,800–$2,500 per student for private van service, roughly $600–$1,400 above what their aid-in-lieu covers.

The LSTA formula was designed from day one to include a township subsidy, Krawiec notes, and everyone remains hopeful that it will be restored.

Legislative fixes

 

A better Township budget isn’t the only hope on the horizon. Several potential fixes are brewing in Trenton.

One bill, sponsored by Assemblyman Avi Schnall, would redirect unspent private-school security and nursing-aid funds toward raising the aid-in-lieu amount, which hasn’t risen from $1,177 in two years. A higher aid-in-lieu figure would mean more leftover money to defray costs for non-mandated students. The bill has passed the Assembly and is expected to clear the Senate as well.

And in what would be the ultimate prize for Lakewood and its surrounding frum towns, Sherrill has expressed interest in revisiting the underlying school-funding formula, which ties state aid to a district’s public-school population. The teachers unions would hate that, but Sherrill is the rare Democrat who hates the teachers union, after the NJEA spent millions backing Sean Spiller, its president and her opponent in a bruising primary.

A fix to that formula could bring relief to tens of thousands of yeshivah families—and would eventually obviate the need for the LSTA altogether, providing enough funds for the school district to run its own busing program.

Signing up

 

For now, though, parents and the LSTA just have to get through this year.

On Tuesday night, as the deadline loomed for courtesy busing signups, a line snaked out the door of the LSTA office on Oberlin Avenue, parents waiting at kiosks while Krawiec and a staffer fielded questions and helped with enrollments.

“Of course,” he says when asked if he’d expected this much pushback. “It’s painful for people.”

The man at the center of the week’s ire seemed improbably calm, patiently answering the questions of parent after parent—and one persistent reporter.

“You have to give people time,” he said after spending 15 minutes answering one couple’s questions about the funding formula.

By Wednesday morning, Krawiec estimated roughly 8,000 non-mandated kids would end up signed up at $675—about 75 percent of those originally enrolled at $385. That means about 2,600 fewer riders on routes already bid out and finalized; some will need to be redrawn or dropped.

He smiles. “It’s really ironic or sad because this year we were as ready as we’d ever been in 10 years. We started in February. We met with the schools over May, June, and July and went over the routes to have a smooth September. This was the last thing that we were expecting. This is a redraw of months of work five days before busing starts. But you have to roll with the punches.”

The road ahead

 

This crisis, as well as the one that led to the creation of the LSTA 10 years ago, trace back to the same source: state funding formulas, written decades ago, that shortchange Lakewood’s schools and its Township government alike.

The only thing that’s certain is that nothing is settled. The $290 gap in this year’s fee still has no confirmed way to be covered. The Township’s budget crisis shows no sign of easing. And the fixes that could solve the underlying problem are still legislative wishes.

Barring a fix on these fronts, courtesy busing in Lakewood will keep being negotiated the way it was this week: year to year, crisis to crisis, with no guarantee that the number holds until the next one.