Middletown Will Likely Collapse Some School Bus Routes

MIDDLETOWN, NJ — This year or next, the Middletown school district will likely collapse some school bus routes.

This is because it is getting more expensive to run the buses and some of the bus routes do not have enough students on them to justify the cost.

This was explained by school district business administrator Amy Gallagher, when she gave a preview of the projected 2022-2023 school year budget at last Wednesday's Board of Education meeting. You can watch the meeting in its entirety here: https://www.middletownk12.org/... She starts talking about the bus routes at 1:33.

This is all preliminary and next year's budget has not been approved by the school board. It is entirely unknown at this point which bus routes will be collapsed or merged with others.

"Overall the cost of our routes are going up. We're looking to collapse some bus routes, where the ridership is not where we need it to be," Gallagher said in her presentation to the board. "We're looking to streamline and continue to look at other routes we can collapse and merge with other routes."

Gallagher said prices are going up; "the cost of gas is going up," and that "routes never used to be that expensive. It just shows you how the costs have gone up."

Middletown had to budget an additional $100,000 into next year's budget just for the price of gas alone, she said.

Board member Harmony "Barry" Heffernan asked Gallagher it would be more cost effective if the district purchased its own school bus fleet, instead of contracting to an outside bus service, as it does currently.

Gallagher said the district has previously talked about buying "a few buses." But —

"We don't feel at this point that buying an entire fleet would produce any real savings," she said. "It would probably cost us more."

"Even districts that own their own buses are seeing rising costs," she said.

Stay tuned for an entire summary of what was said at the most recent Feb. 23 school board meeting.

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