![]() ![]() An email and three phone calls to the DOE went unanswered.Īt a news conference on Monday, Murphy said the state is working on “matchmaking” between the state Department of Labor, “where folks are looking for jobs,” and districts that need to fill positions like bus drivers. Kinsell says direction needs to come from leadership at the state Department of Education. “It’s not like we’re just shaking out the cobwebs, it’s that a lot of school districts don’t have an answer to this and that makes it a crisis.” “We’ve always had bus shortage issues in this state, but I have never seen it to the extent that it is this year and for this long lasting,” said Peg Kinsell, director of public policy at SPAN, a statewide advocacy network that assists parents of children with disabilities. It’s likely she’s not the only one in Newark, and far from the only one in the state. However, as of Tuesday, Maryah was still without a bus assignment. ![]() Questions sent to the Newark spokesperson and pupil transportation department requesting up-to-date figures of students without bus assignments went unanswered over the last five days.ĭukes-Spruill said at the parent meeting the district expected to have every eligible student assigned to a bus by Sept. Dukes-Spruill shared the status of the bus shortage impact in Newark at a public meeting mid-September for parents of students who need special services.Ībout 85% of the eligible students received bus assignments, she said, which left nearly 536 students, either who have IEPs or who qualify for busing based on distance from school, without transportation. Of Newark’s 40,000-plus students, just 9% of students, or about 3,574, were eligible for busing during the first week of school, said Quanika Dukes-Spruill, executive director of the pupil transportation department for Newark Public Schools. Many districts, including Newark, are consolidating bus stops, merging bus routes, and offering bus tickets for public transportation. Camden City Schools said it would give parents $1,000 to drive their children to and from school. “She loves school but she’s getting the short end of the stick here.”ĭistricts throughout the state have been scrambling for ways to temporarily address the bus driver shortage. Her first year in high school,” Lutz said. “This is supposed to be ninth grade for her. Her daughter, she fears, might not respond positively to the stress of that commute. The Newark Board of Education has offered her tickets for public bus transportation, Lutz says, but it would take nearly two hours to travel the 20 miles from Newark to Fairfield. Without district bus transportation and without a car, Lutz hasn’t been able to find an alternative way to get her daughter to her out-of-district placement in Fairfield that specializes in special education. Lutz says her daughter has lost out on at least 30 hours of these services, plus many more hours of academic and life skills learning. Their families, devastated from the pandemic, were forced to come up with last-minute solutions to get their children to school.īeyond the challenges of understanding why they’re not in school, students such as Maryah are also missing out on vital individualized services, such as speech, occupational, and physical therapies. Adding onto a year of disruptions to their education, they started this academic year with confusion over how to get to school. Particularly hard hit are students with disabilities who have bus transportation included in their individualized educational programs. Phil Murphy said Monday.Ī national bus driver shortage, exacerbated in part by the pandemic, has affected hundreds of thousands of students across the country as they returned to school this year. In New Jersey, where no virtual learning option was offered this year, 7,000 students were either left without bus service or affected by last-minute changes to transportation caused by a shortage of school bus drivers that hit its peak this month, just as schools were reopening, Gov. Maryah, who enjoys riding on the school bus with her headphones on while listening to hit music radio stations such as z100, is one of the hundreds of students statewide who still do not have a bus assignment as of Tuesday - the fourth week of school. ![]()
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