Part II – The Hysterics Over Transportation
Let’s go back way back on Transportation (the years when the Township indicated “all roads were safe” before Sai and Natasha got elected, and suddenly two months after they got elected, they suddenly became “unsafe”.
In 2021, Laura wrote, in connection to the presentation on reconfiguration that has since been pulled from the District website:
There will be a reduced need for bussing.
— There is actually an increased need for bussing for the majority of students being redistricted – I honestly do not know who added this one to the slide. And, the only savings in Transportation is because you have done away with courtesy bussing! Source
It was later revealed that the District didn’t actually eliminate courtesy bussing, but rather, it was shrouded in even more mystery.
In 2022, before being elected to the BOE, Ms. Khanna wrote:
In the past, these children would be walking to Woodruff school with their friends along familiar streets in the neighborhood. Second graders from the Hughes and Mountain Park areas need to be bused or driven to their new K-2 school. Children who walk to school develop confidence, personal skills, independence, and healthy walking habits. Multiple studies provide evidence of the importance of walking to school. (see below). Berkeley Heights Township has been working hard to improve the Safe Routes to School program, receiving grants from the County and State over the years.
Those parents who could not flex their schedules to drive their children had to rely on courtesy and subscription busing to get their children to school safely. This has likely increased the demand for bus services in the District. It has also put more financial burden on parents to spend money on subscription busing only to find out late in the summer that some of them (MKM, Mountain Park) did not even have subscription busing available anymore. Source
In 2023, as parents were informed about 11th-hour cuts to Transportation, residents began to demand answers as to how the District was making decisions on which families got free bussing and which families had to pay $1,000. The responses they received from the BOE President were comical.
That same year, Ms. Khanna again asked about the criteria and numbers connected to Courtesy bussing and the District, yet again refused to provide the information. Instead, the Board majority at the time pushed out a list of talking points that took me no more than 15 minutes to unravel.
After the new majority secured their position on the BOE, the Business Administrator and former BOE President still attempted to interfere in providing information to the community. The response, established by the former Board the prior year, was a presentation that simply did not answer any of the residents’ questions. To add insult to injury, the community also discovered that the “list” of roads did not have any evidenced tie back to the consultants who made the presentation.
As the New BOE was trying to fix this mess that resulted in many working families having to pay $1,000 out of their pockets for transportation needs that arose out of the botched configuration while other did not pay anything (again– with no established criteria) operatives from both political houses suddenly came out of the woodwork in criticizing the New BOE for not adopting the same failed policies of the past.
These operatives, who had been silent for three years on this issue, decided to become vocal in the first few months of the new BOE in dramatic fashion. This included the Mayor, Town Council Members, and former BOE members.
Despite this second act in a political circus, the new Board of Education adopted a policy with clear criteria that offers more affordable Transportation to all families compared to other similar Districts.
As I stated in my last article in this series, there is very much a circus surrounding our District and we should ask ourselves who the real clowns are.
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