By Reuvain Borchardt

 

 

Ten years ago, the Lakewood Student Transportation Authority was created to solve one of the community’s most pressing challenges: busing thousands of children to school safely and efficiently without any dedicated state support.

 

As the organization marks its first decade and looks ahead to its next, LSTA Director Rabbi Avraham Krawiec and Lakewood Board of Ed member Rabbi Moshe Bender spoke with The Voice about the challenges, triumphs, and evolution of the unique authority that handles private-school busing for the greater Lakewood area.

 

It seems the only thing that has not changed in recent years in this town is the LSTA office, where we sat for four hours on a scorching summer day in a grungy space with exposed pipes and air-conditioning that is as loud as it is ineffective, listening to the facts and figures and ages and cutoff dates and financial details and political wrangling inherent in getting kids to and from school.

 

How We Got Here

 

It was early in 2016 when Lakewood community leaders were handed a bombshell: The state monitor ruled it could no longer provide free busing to non-mandated students. If nothing were done, it would mean thousands of kids had no affordable means of transportation to and from school every day.

 

To understand this ruling and its implications, a little background is in order. It’s going to be just a bit technical, but I’ll try to keep it simple. Trust me, I hate numbers more than you do.

 

In New Jersey, free busing is provided for all students of both public and private schools, provided they live at least two miles from their elementary school or 2.51 miles from their high school, known as “mandated.” If they live a shorter distance away (“non-mandated”), they get nothing.

 

 

If a mandated student from a private school cannot be put on a route— because no bus company wants to pick up that route or the kid lives too far from other students, for example— his parents are given a fixed amount of “aid-in-lieu” with which to theoretically find their own busing.

 

In 2016, the aid-in-lieu amount was $884. The cost of busing, or aid-in-lieu, is paid 60 percent by the district (in this case, the Lakewood Board of Ed) and 40 percent by the state.

 

So what do all the non-mandated students do?

 

Some districts provide busing to non-mandated students if they pay the cost of the route. But districts that are considered low-income (like Lakewood) are prohibited by law from charging students for any services, so that is not an option. Instead, the Lakewood Board of Ed had for decades fully funded the non-mandated students in both public and private schools.

 

In 2015, the Lakewood BoE began taking out loans from the state to cover its sharp budget shortfalls, which resulted from New Jersey’s education funding formula.

 

“The state allocates education funding to a district based on its number of public-school students,” explains Bender, who joined the BoE in 2017. “But the district still has to provide funding for ancillary services, including busing, for private- school students.

 

“In a district like Lakewood, where the number of private-school students far exceeds those in public schools, this results in a massive funding disparity.” The Lakewood BoE currently owes the state $200 million. Everyone knows that just a small portion of these loans will ever be repaid. They are essentially grants dressed up as loans.

 

But since the BoE takes this money from the state, the state installed a monitor to oversee the BoE’s finances. And in early 2016, the monitor ruled that the BoE could no longer fund non-mandated students.

 

And if the BoE could not pay for busing for the non-mandated private students, it could not pay for the non-mandated public students either, because the law prohibits a district from providing any ancillary service for one segment without the other.

 

(That’s it for the technicalities. I hope you’re still with me.)

 

So the Lakewood BoE could no longer pay for busing for its non-mandated students, nor could it charge them for it. Which meant that for the 2016–2017 school year, over 10,000 non-mandated students in Lakewood would have no government- sponsored busing.

 

Innovation to Prevent a Crisis

 

Lakewood officials knew this would be an intolerable reality. Having all these students carpool every morning would throw the town’s streets and family schedules into chaos. There were also thousands of non-mandated public-school students; many of them were from poor immigrant families, and if there was no busing, they might simply not show up to school.

 

Something had to be done.

 

A group of community leaders— including Ralph Zucker and Avi Schnall from the Agudah, Ray Coles and Meir Lichtenstein from the Lakewood Township Committee, and BMG CEO Rabbi Aaron Kotler— came up with a proposal for the state, a concept that was innovative but could prevent an impending crisis in Lakewood.

 

 

They said the state should consider the entire Lakewood private- school community as an aidin- lieu district and just put $884 per mandated private-school student into a pot, which would be administered by a new entity dubbed the “Lakewood Student Transportation Authority.” The LSTA would not only use the funds to try to provide busing for mandated students; it would also do so at as low a price as possible for the non-mandated.

 

Here’s how it would work: The LSTA would put the bus routes up for bid among the local bus companies. Say the lowest bid was for $600 a student; that would leave $284 from each mandated student in the pot. These funds would be put toward busing non-mandated students.

 

Of course, that would not be enough to fully cover the cost of busing non-mandated students. The rest would be borne by two sources: Lakewood Township would contribute some (while the monitor could bar the Lakewood BoE from spending funds on non-mandated busing, it had no authority over what the township did with its own funds); and the LSTA would charge parents the rest.

Although the law prohibited the BoE in a low-income town from charging the parents anything, the LSTA was a unique entity and under no such restrictions. Additionally, as part of the deal, the township said it would fully fund the non-mandated public students.

 

Getting It Off the Ground

 

The private schools in Lakewood got together, signed on, and elected an LSTA board. The board hired Krawiec—who had previous experience running Oorah camps—as LSTA director. He put together a staff. But a state bill still had to be passed authorizing the program.

 

The legislative process can be frustratingly slow. Passing a bill means getting legislators in each house to sponsor and shepherd it through committee hearings and debates before it comes to a floor vote.

 

Governor Chris Christie signed it on August 16, 2016, a date burned into Krawiec’s memory. School was starting September 1—and they had just two weeks to get ready for its first year.

 

By all accounts, the kickoff was a disaster.

 

The officials in the entity that had previously run the township’s busing, the Board of Ed’s Transportation Department, which was now dissolved, appeared to have no interest in helping the LSTA. They refused to even provide them access to the state’s bus mapping program, which the LSTA was required to use. “All the Board of Ed gave us,” Krawiec says, “was a list of students and their schools and their addresses and basically said, ‘Figure it out.’”

 

The LSTA had to buy the program from the vendor that had supplied it to the state, which took months to implement from scratch. It had to collect paper forms from the non-mandated kids who wanted to buy in to the new system, then had to map the routes and put them up for bid with local bus companies. Many bus companies had already taken routes in other towns because they could wait no longer.

 

And so, as the school year began, thousands of kids had no buses, and families had to carpool. Parents were late to work, traffic was even more gridlocked than usual, and disorder and confusion reigned.

 

The LSTA, and especially its director, practically had their faces on Most Wanted posters.

 

“I couldn’t walk the streets; everybody wanted my head,” Krawiec recalls with a laugh that’s still somewhat bitter, adding, “I try not to think about those days.”

 

As the weeks and months rolled on, routes were added, the new system was implemented, and by February, most kids had buses and things had more or less settled down.

 

The Years and the Buses Go Round and Round

 

Some things change, and some things stay the same.

 

The private-school population serviced by the LSTA has soared from 25,000 in 2016 to 58,000 in 2026.

 

The share of students who are non-mandated has remained around one-third.

 

The state has gradually raised the aidin- lieu amount from $884 to its current $1,177. (That $1,177 has remained stagnant for the past two years, and the current indication from Trenton is that it won’t be raised for next year.)

 

The law authorizing the LSTA is always for a limited duration, and it periodically must be passed again.

 

Parents now sign up online rather than with paper forms; there are computer portals in the LSTA office for people without internet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The biggest change occurred two years ago, when a law passed that allowed the LSTA to provide busing for mandated students from nearby towns like Jackson, Toms River, and Howell.

 

“Those townships and their community leaders were happy to help work to make this happen because we took a big headache off their hands,” Krawiec says. With a wink at Bender, he adds, “And the Lakewood BoE, by the way, has been much more helpful and collaborative in recent years as well.”

 

Previously, yeshivah students in those towns did not have busing. No bus company would want such a route because there were either not enough students from an individual yeshivah living in any one of those towns, or the town’s distance from the center of the community meant that a bus going there couldn’t do multiple runs, which is how companies make their money. So those kids had to carpool or pay for private busing, which cost about double the aidin- lieu they were receiving.

 

But now that the LSTA could cover them, it could combine their routes with the Lakewood kids— since virtually all the kids are coming into Lakewood for school anyway— and offer busing to most of the mandated yeshivah kids in those towns.

 

(The only difference is that the LSTA asks their parents to pay $95 to help cover administrative costs. That’s because the outlying townships’ routes are more expensive, and if the LSTA took its administrative expenses out of the $1,177—as it is permitted to do—the route would not be profitable for bus companies.)

 

Non-mandated kids outside Lakewood are not given any busing, because unlike Lakewood, those townships don’t kick in to cover the costs for their children. But the LSTA will still put the kid on a bus if they pay $1,177.

 

Today, many of the more than 2,000 bus routes overseen by the LSTA are “mixed.”

 

“The LSTA has no borders,” Krawiec likes to say. “We only have a mission: to get as many kids on buses as possible.”

 

And that mission involves jumping through hoops to make routes as efficient as possible to keep costs as low as possible while trying to ensure that as few children as possible are left behind.

 

Krawiec calls this “transportation calisthenics.”

 

He enthusiastically jumps out of his chair—momentarily startling Bender and me—to point to a screen with color-coded maps and overlaid routes showing how he improved efficiencies this year. (There’s no AI program for this yet; it’s all done by the LSTA staff.)

 

 

 

He constantly juggles routes, making a tweak here and another there, to make sure none are too long and as many students as possible get on a bus.

 

As part of his pursuit for efficiency, this year, for the first time, he started combining schools on bus routes. In one example he is particularly proud of: For next year he put together two neighboring mesivtas that used to each have a 45-minute route; those two routes will now be separated by neighborhood rather than by school, resulting in a trip that takes 15 minutes shorter.

 

Additionally, the new combined routes left just eight bachurim from those two schools without busing; the previous year there were 28.

 

To make some routes in farther-out neighborhoods work out and run on a reasonable timetable, occasionally Krawiec has had to make a single stop for several students, which can inconvenience parents’ morning and afternoon schedules. He says the parents generally have embraced this, understanding that having individual stops in their area would result in an impossibly long route for which no bus company would bid.

 

 

The Complaints

 

The challenges will continue, as will the criticisms.

 

There aren’t enough bus companies in the area to handle all the kids, so 6 percent of Jackson yeshivah students still don’t have busing, along with almost 30 percent of those in Toms River and Howell. (Those students, assuming they are mandated, get the $1,177 aid-in-lieu, though their cost of private busing or carpooling is much steeper in money and headaches.)

 

And so, there are, of course, parents who complain about the LSTA.

 

Non-mandated parents wonder why, with all the property taxes they are paying, they still have to fork over money to get their kid on a bus (this year the parents had to pay $370 per child; next year it’ll be $385).

 

 

 

Krawiec and Bender say they are sympathetic to those frustrated parents who are already suffering from a high cost of living and tight schedules amid our traffic realities, but they believe the grievances are largely due to people not understanding the laws, what the LSTA does, and what the alternatives are.

 

“We’re under the assumption that if we pay property taxes, we get buses,” Bender says. “Unfortunately, our property tax has zero connection to how much we get for busing. The state does not give busing at all for non-mandated kids. Lakewood is the only district in New Jersey where non-mandated kids get subsidized busing at all. In any town in this state other than Lakewood, you’d be paying five times your current $385 cost for busing.”

 

 

“And some people assume,” Krawiec says, “that just because they are mandated they deserve to have their kids picked up directly from their house and be in school in under 30 minutes. That would be amazing, but it’s just not always possible. We need to make the routes efficient so no one is sitting on the bus for too long, and we need to fill up the buses because the bus companies get paid per student.

 

“If we picked up every kid from his house no matter how far he lives, the route would take 90 minutes or we’d have to make a route of just 30 kids—which no company would bid on because they’re not profitable. Then you’d be stuck without any busing at all. You’ll have $1,177 from the state but no bus.

 

“Some people remember back to when their non-mandated kids got free busing, before 2016,” he continues. “We’re not the ones who said that had to stop—it was the state monitor. What the LSTA is doing is helping you have something that you wouldn’t have otherwise: get your non-mandated kids, who everywhere else get nothing at all, to and from school at a cost of about a dollar per trip.

 

“What we do is work to find every possibility to give parents in the communities we serve a better and cheaper system than the one they’d be getting if they lived anywhere else in New Jersey.”

 

When I ask why we see mesivta bachurim hitching to yeshivah in the morning, Krawiec says it’s because their yeshivos start Shacharis in between the busing “tier times.”

 

“We have to have standard drop-off times in the morning, which we set up as 7:30, 8:30, and 9:15,” he says. “The bus companies need to have expectations for times throughout the system, when a route ends and the next one begins. They can’t operate with every school having their own drop-off time.”

 

So if a mesivta has Shacharis at 8:00 a.m., their talmidim are kind of in no-man’s land and just hitch.

 

A Shrinking Pot

 

 

Krawiec warns that non-mandated busing is in danger—perhaps not next year, but in the not-too-distant future—due to the shrinking pot of funds left over from the mandated kids.

The aid-in-lieu amount, currently $1,177, has risen 33 percent over the past decade. But bus-related costs have risen even more: Diesel fuel is up over 40 percent (even before the Iran war), driver wages have risen 50 to 60 percent, the cost of buying a bus has more than doubled, and insurance rates have skyrocketed as well.

Bus companies can bid up to the aid-in-lieu amount for each route, which is currently $1,177 per student. But they used to bid well below it, leaving plenty over for the non-mandated kids. With the rising costs, companies are now bidding only about $100 under the maximum for each route—anything less would be unprofitable—leaving little left over to help subsidize the non-mandated kids.

Additionally, once a bus company has driven a route one year, it has the automatic right to renew that route the next year for a specified increase set by law (this year it’s 3.5 percent) up to the $1,177 max, rather than have it put up for bid again and potentially be undercut by a competitor.

Add it all up, and you have a shrinking pot to cover the $8.5 million it costs to bus non-mandated Lakewood students and run the LSTA, even with the leftover funds they get from mandated kids.

That means that unless the aid-in-lieu amount gets sharply increased, more kids start going to farther schools and become mandated, the state lowers the distance from school that a child may live and still be considered “mandated,” or Lakewood Township somehow comes up with vast sums of money to increase the $2.7 million it’s already paying into the system, non-mandated parents can expect their cost to get their kid onto an LSTA bus to steadily increase from next year’s $385.

“We never know what the future will bring,” Krawiec says. “The only thing we do know is that, like everything else, we’re going to have to constantly adapt. If we’d remained stagnant, we would’ve been dead a long time ago.”

 

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Not fine for the fives

 

One unwelcome change for Lakewood residents this year is that while busing used to be provided for any student who turned five by December 31, now the cutoff is October 1.

“Lakewood was the only town in New Jersey that had the cutoff date of December 31,” Bender says. “But the state just said we can’t do that anymore. They don’t want to give their 40 percent of the busing funds for it, and the Board of Ed can’t give our 60 percent because their monitor won’t allow us.”

There are 537 kids registered in Lakewood yeshivos who were born between October 1 and December 31 of 2021—324 mandated, 213 non-mandated. Due to the new state ruling, none of them get any funding. If they want busing, they’ll have to pay $1,177 to purchase a seat on an LSTA bus.

 

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