Your Turn

Guest Column
Neal M. Rosen
Busing woes linked to state funding, apathy

As a former member of the East Brunswick Board of Education and as a parent of two former East Brunswick students who were walkers to grade school, I have some understanding of the current busing controversy. As we lived beyond the minimum busing distance to Frost, our children were expected to walk to school. Until they were older, one of us, or a carpool, walked with them or drove them to school; they were never permitted to walk by themselves. We felt that young children should not cross streets without supervision and we did not want them to be targets for dangerous strangers

Having said that, let me be clear that I believe that every family living in town should be the recipient of the same level of services from the board. Every student should be bused to school, if the child’s parents request the service. Unfortunately, my utopian approach to busing is simply not realistic. Busing costs are outrageous. Offering free busing to every student would inflate the school budget by millions. Those extra costs would never be completely reimbursed by the state.

The only reasonable alternative to universal busing is to establish an arbitrary standard. The state has done that with its mandated busing distances. Our town uses a point system to determine if walking routes are hazardous. Students who have to use hazardous routes are assigned busing until the route is re-evaluated as safe. The committee that makes this determination includes representation by the police department.

The tone of the letters I have lately seen follow a familiar theme. They accuse the Board of Education of not caring about the safety of the kids. Eventually, they attack other uses of board funds, usually singling out the superintendent’s salary as the first area of waste to be attacked.

I can tell you from the perspective of more than 15 years of board service that every board member I served with cared deeply about the safety and education of our kids. Board members are not paid for their efforts; often the only pay they receive is to have angry parents screaming at them when they don’t get their way. Demeaning school board members or the administration is a rather immature way to deal with these issues. The superintendent of a district with more than 9,000 students and a staff of 1,100 certainly should be provided with compensation appropriate to a chief executive of a large enterprise. The dollars to fund transportation cannot be found there.

Board members have a different perspective than do individual parents. The board must weigh the needs of all competing segments of the educational community. Security ranks very high on that list, but so does cost-cutting to funnel more dollars into the classroom. Every year there will be some people who will not get everything that they want or think they must have.

If you have to blame someone for the busing situation, then blame the governor and the state legislature for failing to properly fund education. Despite sharp rises in our costs, East Brunswick has received virtually unchanged state contributions to its budget for years.

If you have to blame someone for the busing situation, then blame yourselves. How many of you voted to defeat the budget or didn’t vote at all? Why must our budgets be crafted without any extra margin for contingencies? It’s easy to complain about high taxes; every budget cut is an abstraction that does not hit home until suddenly it affects your family personally. Why don’t more citizens insist that the budget should be funded at higher levels or why do they wait to get involved until they personally feel the pain their apathy has caused?

Now that some families have felt this pain, they are upset. It is fine to have the route evaluated again. If the route is still judged safe, affected parents should do what my family did. We took our kids to school ourselves or we arranged for carpools to share the job. For high school, we felt that the distance was too far for them to walk and we paid for a bus to take them there. You, too, can do these things.

I applaud you for caring about the safety of your children. By all means, don’t let the young ones walk to school. There are other choices.

Neal M. Rosen is a former member and president of the East Brunswick Board of Education