Across hours of wide-ranging discussion and public comments at their monthly public meeting on Sept. 24, several South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education members offered apologies for the failures in the rollout of a new three-tiered busing plan as well as a new paraprofessional contract for the 2026-27 school year.
At times during discussion, the decisions that caused the failures were blamed on budget constraints as well as past decisions by the Board of Education and administrators going back decades.
But BOE members also questioned the recent process, with some seeking more oversight and accountability from administration.
“Before I go any further, I do want to also acknowledge plainly that this was a failure,” said 1st Vice President Liz Callahan, during her Special Services Committee report. “There were parents who were already navigating transportation challenges for their children and who were also then still faced with a gap in paraprofessional support. The impact was even farther compounded. And for that, I personally apologize. As was discussed tonight, I do agree that we do need to take a closer look at governance, communication, personal habits, oversight practices, not simply to understand what happened, but also to identify where we can do better. And I feel hopeful that through potentially a special meeting, as Board Member [Deirdre] Brown offered, as well as the work that’s already reflected in the board goals that we developed, that we can look at those systems. And I do believe that we are capable, collegial, and all deeply committed to this work.”
Callahan then detailed steps that were being taken to improve special services and perform a post-mortem on the implementation of the new paraprofessional contract.
Watch Callahan’s comments and the ensuring discussion starting at 5:27:26 in the video:
Earlier in the meeting Board President Will Meyer also addressed the failings of the new paraprofessional vendor Delta-T Group. Meyer said, “they pulled the rug out from under us… I was livid,” referring to Delta-T telling the district that there was a surfeit of paras a week out from the beginning of school, only to report they were short many paras just the weekend before school began.
“It was all hands on deck in the administration and with the board,” said Meyer. “At the end of the day, the outcome was not acceptable.” Meyer reported that by the end of the third week of school all of the positions were filled.
But some parents who spoke during public comments were unmoved. Danielle Thorn told Meyer: “Will, you should have known. We told you.”
Watch parents public comments starting at 3:45:12 in the video:
Parents had raised alarms about changing the contract in June and July and several parents from SEPAC – the Special Education Parents Advisory Committee — provided a timeline that included a complaint filed with the NJ Dept. of Labor against Delta-T Group alleging the misclassification of employees in August.
After Callahan’s remarks, Board member Paul Stephan noted that there had been similar complaints about paras under the former paraprofessional contractor with ESS, and that the district had only received one bid for the services for 2026-27 (from ESS) before going to the co-op that provided Delta-T.
“I think this is a place where we should look at bringing services in-house,” said Stephan. “I think we need to break out of the third party vendor model. I know there’s been discussion on that and cost is the big barrier. There was a review several months ago … comparing our current costs for paraprofessionals versus in-house, and it’s a huge disparity. … We have SOMEA [the teachers union] leadership here. We need your partnership on this. We need to come to some kind of agreement so we can pay paraprofessionals in a way that meets our budget while also bring them in-house. We need to have those conversations.”
Supt. Jason Bing noted that there were 79 paraprofessionals in the district when they were all fired and replaced by contractors in 2010. “When Kathleen [Asst. Supt. of Special Services Kathleen Gesumaria] and I came in the district, there were 275 [paras], 24 months ago. So there’s a lot of factors that play into this.”
[Editor’s note: The reporter of this story also wrote a story for Maplewood Patch on the outsourcing of paraprofessionals back in 2010. Read it here: School District to Outsource Special Ed Paraprofessionals.]
Bing said that the previous contractor, ESS, was hitting the district with mid-year price increases that were unsustainable. “We would have been a midyear hit and we’d have to RIF [reduction in force] staff midyear. It was not doable, plain and simple.”
Bing said that administrative staff had been working on cost estimates for bringing more services back in house.
“We’ll share the data that we’ve been working on for two years in regards to bringing folks in-house. We can make that public and show everybody the numbers. We can also, by next month, once they’re out, show our projection numbers in regards to what our [budget] gap is going to look like because it’s going to be larger than it was last year, which was $8 million.”
Board 2nd Vice President and Chair of the Finance Committee Malini Nayar proposed that the district could look at bringing a subset of paras in house to start.
“If we decide to invest in bringing paraprofessionals in house, not 200, but maybe some subset. And if we do decide to invest in some fleet of buses or vans, what does that cost us?” asked Nayar.
“I know they’re all tough decisions, so what’s the least tough decision we can make if we have to do this other thing?” Referencing an earlier comment by Board member Jeff Bennitt, Nayar added, “I think we’ve got to talk about it holistically. Otherwise, we’re just going to tackle one problem and not tackle another problem that will arise because we tackled this one problem.”
Bing responded, “We’re in a hole. We have privatized everything that could be privatized. That is not normal fair for most districts. Every service in this district is privatized and that’s happened over the last 20 years, whether it’s security, paraprofessionals, lunch monitors, transportation, you name it, it’s privatized. And that’s one of the realities that we face right now.”
Transportation (and the Intentional Integration Initiative)
Regarding transportation, Meyer, during his President’s Report, detailed painstaking planning and investments in technology, and said that many of the issues had to do with the vendor BelAir and its drivers and personnel.
He noted that “while we had a significant number of buses that ran really well, we had a large number of them that did not. Or ones that did at first, and then after day three or four they didn’t.” Parents have complained of business arriving over an hour late at stops or not arriving at all, and some children not getting home until one or two hours after the close of school.
Overall, Meyer said, “I think there is a lot of frustration on the dais tonight…. That is not to say that there is not faith in the administration but what we hear a lot from parents is, how are you holding the district responsible, how are you holding them accountable?”
“We have to give a little less rope. We have to have more frequent check-ins. … a lot more oversight ….”, said Meyer.
In a lengthy discussion after 2nd Board President Nayar’s Finance Facilities and Technology Committee, some BOE members proposed ending courtesy busing (non-state-mandated busing within 2 miles of school for elementary students and 2.5 miles of school for high school students), while others asked to revisit the Intentional Integration Initiative, which they said was causing the transportation issues due to disparate placements.
Board member Stephan again advocated bringing busing back in-house.
“I want us to continue looking into bringing both transportation and paraprofessionals in house,” said Stephan. “I will say that I am willing for us to ask the board of school estimate for additional tax dollars to make those things happen.” He noted, “There’s a state grant program that’ll hopefully be renewed that’ll basically allow us to buy electric buses at a comparable cost of diesel” and suggest the district partner with the municipalities — “Maplewood in particular. Maybe this is a space we can have some shared services and have some partnership with our municipalities who know that we’re in this kind of budget crunch.”
Board member Bimal Kapadia tied the busing problems to Triple I placements.
“I guess it’s how much more do our students need to lose to show that this model of transportation and the placement model behind it, it’s not working,” said Kapadia. He cited student safety: “This is about students and our youngest students that are as young, as young as six years old being on these buses. They are waiting for buses. They are chronically late.” He said, “We’re talking about like hundreds of students and it’s not an occasional bad day.” Kapadia called for more resources to go into classrooms.
Board member Deirdre Brown echoed his remarks about safety: “What’s happened with the para contract and what’s happened with the transportation contract, I would say is dangerous. It’s not putting our students first and it been all avoidable. And I do want to apologize as a board member because I do believe that we have not provided the oversight that is our duty.”
She also echoed Kapadia’s argument that dollars spent on busing to dollars could be spent in classrooms: “If we’re really trying to help our students, address our achievement gaps with students of color, special services students, that is really what the Rutgers Recommendations are about. And they’re not about moving kids around schools. They’re about providing resources in classrooms.”
Board member Meredith Higgins suggested ending courtesy busing.
“I’m going to say the uncomfortable thing out loud that I think it’s time that we also need to talk about decoupling what is our mandate of desegregating schools and what is courtesy busing, because these two things, they have been in lockstep since the beginning, but they are actually not linked.” Higgins noted that the Essex County Schools Business Administrator John Ferraro had recently expressed surprise that the district was offering courtesy busing. “It was like a slap in the face,” said Higgins.
BOE member Shayna Sackett-Gable said she would support “revisiting the mileage threshold if it meant better transportation outcomes for students, especially since more students are being placed closer to their homes.”
Calling the rollout of the three-tiered busing system a “fiasco”, Board member Jeff Bennett noted that the impacts of the placements for the Triple I could not be easily undone.
“Regarding the overall problems, the Triple I is nowhere near stability. In the first two years of the Triple I, there was no kindergarten at Delia Bolden. And we added a kindergarten at Delia Bolden for the next two years. And then in the fifth year of the Triple I, we changed the placement method from a random precedence method for assigning kids to the nearest school to the proximity precedence method to assigning kids,” said Bennett.
“So you don’t have stability year to year. And as a result of that, and especially a result of the first couple years of the Triple I, you have a very difficult system of kids to bus. We have kids across K-5, traveling all 30 possible dyads. And that’s just a very complex bus system.”
“I am also of the opinion that we cannot remove courtesy transportation while we have our Triple I integration program in place,” said Board President Meyer. “I happen to think that there are a lot of merits to the way that we currently assign students and to the intentional integration initiative writ large. But I will also note that we have already made changes to it. We have significantly loosened the transfer policy, and the district has changed the assignment of students to their closest school by priority versus a random placement. So there are reasons to expect that we are already in the process of seeing some of the changes that will eventually have an impact. And Jeff nails it, that any change that does not involve reassigning hundreds, if not thousands of students to a different elementary school in order to save money, which to be clear, I am not in favor of — unless you do that, it takes so many years.”
“We just finished the six-year plan of integrating all of our elementary schools. And with sibling priority, the time it would take to un-integrate them would be significantly longer than six years. So I think we have to acknowledge, whether you are a fan of the Triple I or not, it is here right now. I don’t think we can reasonably expect parents to get their kids to some of the farther schools that they have been assigned to without transportation right now. Although if we have other, you know, creative solutions to that, I’d be very interested in hearing them. I think the merits of having more thoughtfully created direct routes that perhaps parents walk a little farther to in their neighborhood to have a straight shot, maybe even a one stop service that could be a way to bridge this gap.”
Supt. Bing ended the conversation on a somber note about budget constraints and transportation.
“We are in an awful place. We are not at the fiscal cliff anymore. We are over it. And I just have to keep emphasizing that. The only thing we have left on the board are staffing, programs, and transportation. That is it,” said Bing.
He added, “Unless some miracle happens at the state level, we have to look at what we have left on the bone other than staffing and programs, and that’s transportation. That’s, that’s where we’re at, uh, while keeping our buildings from falling apart. And as noted previously, keeping our kids safe.”
Read a full transcript of the transportation/Triple I conversation here.
