Just a day after discussing the ramifications of cutting budgets for school transportation, parents from Lakewood, New Jersey are participating in a protest of proposed plans to cut “courtesy busing.”
Currently, both nonpublic and public school students who live within 2.5 miles of their schools in the area can ride a public school bus from their homes to their classes. Of the roughly 10,450 students who use the service, more than 8,10 attend private schools.
To protest the proposed cuts, parents of children attending private schools are temporarily boycotting the bus system both today and tomorrow after meetings with school leaders failed to reach a solution. They are doing so as a “drill” to show the traffic problems likely to arise when the cuts go into effect next school year.
While this is a more complex situation than the typical cases of schools cutting budgets for student transportation, it also highlights another problem many of the districts considering similar cuts may not be considering.
While cutting transportation from the budget will save money, it also creates access problems for students. Most likely, if a school has a tight enough budget to consider transportation cuts, they probably don’t have the money to expand roads and other infrastructure around their schools to alleviate the severe traffic jams created by a sudden and unplanned for spike in the number of cars trying to reach schools.
By simply showing the difficulties of allowing the tidal wave of cars to access schools during the heavy traffic periods, these parents are highlighting the fact that our entire society is built around these vehicles, and without them a whole new group of problems arise. You can try to cut buses from your school district, but that only means hiring more help to direct traffic, protect students, and eventually these districts will be forced to invest efforts into increasing road access and even parking for their schools.
Doesn’t it seem cheaper and easier to find other more practical cost-saving methods such as restoring buses that still have some life into them, rather than go through all this mess?
