Brick Parents Angered Over Changes To Donovan Catholic Bus Runs

BRICK, NJ — Parents of Brick Township children who attend St. Joseph's Grammar School and Donovan Catholic High School are expressing frustration over changes to busing they say puts students in dangerous situations.

At a meeting Monday night at Brick Township High School, parents whose children attend the two private Catholic schools were told that the bus runs were being consolidated for the 2016-17 school year due to a lack of bidders through the Monmouth Ocean Educational Services Commission for runs under the previous service format.

Last year, there were four buses that picked up students for Donovan and St. Joseph's, and those buses made frequent stops, similar to buses for public schools. This year, however, there will be just two buses, with four centralized stops for each bus run, said Dennis Filippone, who was promoted to director of planning, research and evaluation in central administration recently.

"We put the (St. Joseph's/Donovan) runs out to bid twice with the same stops as last year," Filippone said, "once in May, and once in June, and there were no bids." The district consolidated the runs and centralized the stops and only one company bid on it."

Under state law, a school district must provide busing for remote students, who are defined as students who live more than 2 miles from their elementary school or more than 2-1/2 miles from their high school. A district also must provide busing for special needs students, and for preschool students who meet certain criteria, according to the state Department of Education website.

But for students who attend private, charter or Choice schools, the rules are different. Public school districts that bus students to schools must either provide a bus or aid (money) in lieu of the busing for students who attend a private school that is within 20 miles of their home, according to the law.

There’s a catch, however: the cost of transporting those nonpublic students cannot exceed the maximum amount set by the state per pupil for the transportation of those students. That amount is set at $884, according to the state Department of Education.

Filippone said the district looked at where the students live and tried to pick centralized locations that would be within 2 miles of the students' homes when it put the two routes back out to bid.

But parents said those centralized locations in some cases are dangerous to students, who face having to walk along roads with no sidewalks or crossing busy county highways to get to and from those bus stops.

"My son has to cross Brick Boulevard to get from our home to the PAL," said one mother, who asked not to be identified. Students who live in the Lake Riviera development, including some of the elementary age children, have been assigned to a centralized stop at the Brick Police Athletic League building on Drum Point Road, forcing those students to cross the always busy road to get to and from Lake Riviera.

Another parent whose child would be picked up at Visitation Roman Catholic Church said the route from the church to home, along Mantoloking Road, is without sidewalks.

"What happens in the wintertime when it snows?" she said. "These kids will be forced to walk in the street."

Other parents raised safety concerns about dropoff locations that lack supervision. Both Angela Hibberd Park and Pinewood Park soccer complex were selected as centralized bus stops, parents said. "How can we be sure our kids are safe?" a mother said. "What if there's someone lurking there?"

Filippone said many of the 77 parents who attended Monday evening's meeting raised similar concerns, and said he and others involved are scheduled to meet with a group of parents Wednesday to take another look at the locations of the centralized bus stops.

For working parents, getting home to pick up children from the bus stop is problematic — a point Filippone acknowledged.

"Being a single parent in today's day and age is a difficult task," he said, one he said the district understands.

"We are constrained by what is possible" for the bus routes, he said.

"One possibility would be to have all the stops at (district) schools," he said. The current stops — four on the north side of town, four on the south — include Warren H. Wolf Elementary School on the south side and St. Dominic's Grade School on the north side.

Filippone said if the decision was made to go forward with the stops as is, the district would be in touch with the police department to seek their assistance in making sure children were being kept safe. And for parents who have children who need afterschool supervision, the district does offer the B.E.S.T. program, he said.

Part of the issue in getting bids for the bus routes, Filippone said, is some bus companies are refusing to take routes in Ocean County, for reasons he said aren't quite clear.

At Durham Bus Services, which has offices in Freehold and Little Egg Harbor Township, a woman who answered the phone said Durham will take on routes regardless of where they are so long as they have the staff to do it.

"We have to have the drivers," she said. "If we don't have the drivers, obviously we can't do it."

Lack of bus drivers may be an underlying issue. A search of a couple of job sites turned up several ads seeking bus drivers, some offering bonuses — and several offering $14 to $16 per hour.

In addition, there is competition for buses from Lakewood, where nearly 19,000 private school studentsare expected to be bused to school this year, according to the Asbury Park Press.

But parents of the Donovan Catholic students complained that while their children were forced to go to centralized stops, children attending St. Rose and being bused from Brick are still able to get the bus much closer to their homes.

"How is that fair?" one mom said.

Last year, the district ran into a similar situation of frustrated parents when it moved to eliminate a bus for students attending Christian Brothers Academy and Red Bank Catholic because the cost of providing the bus to the students who were eligible for busing (limited to 20 miles from the student's home) exceeded the $884 set as the maximum per-student cost. Those parents and the district worked out a bus provided on a subscription basis, with parents whose children were not eligible for free busing paying to ride. That also resulted in the centralization of bus stops to one on the north side of town.

Filippone said the centralization of bus stops for private schools is happening elsewhere as the availability of buses becomes a problem.

"Both Jackson and Lacey have had to go to centralized bus stops" for the private school bus runs, he said.

"I'm hoping we can come up with changes (at the Wednesday meeting) to make it more palatable," Filippone said. "It's never going to be perfect. There will be people who love (the current stops) who hate the new ones."

"You have to do the best you can with the hand you're dealt," Filippone said.

The Brick PAL building is one of the sites set to become a centralized bus stop for students attending Donovan Catholic and St. Joseph's Grammar School. Karen Wall photo