In a lengthy conversation on September 24, members of the South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education discussed the “fiasco” of the first four weeks of the district’s three-tiered busing program — a plan that was supposed to overcome issues around missed stops and late pickups and dropoffs that have plagued SOMSD transportation for the last few years — and how they felt those woes were or were not tied to the district’s Intentional Integration Initiative.
Since its inaugural year in 2021-2022, the “Triple I” has gradually placed children, grade by grade, throughout elementary schools (and middle schools until this year) by using socio-economic status (SES) data. The goal, which has been largely accomplished, has been to racially balance the elementary schools. School leaders have called the Triple I a legal necessity and a moral imperative.
In implementing the Triple I, the BOE had planned to only bus elementary school children who were over 2 miles distant from their schools (as required by state law) — eliminating courtesy busing that existed at closer proximities. When parents found that they would be without buses shortly before the beginning of the 2022-23 school year, there was an outcry. Courtesy busing was ultimately restored, as were buses for some hazardous routes.
On Sept. 24, BOE members discussed whether or how courtesy busing, disparate placements through the Triple I, and other factors — such as traffic, vendor performance, budget — have continued to hamper the delivery of timely and efficient school transportation. Read a report of the conversation, as well as a discussion around the “failures” of the new paraprofessionals vendor here.
Following is a transcript of the September 24, 2026 BOE transportation conversation, following the Finance Committee report by BOE 2nd Vice President Malini Nayar (the transcribed comments begin at 5:01:05 in the video; Nayar’s full Finance Facilities and Transportation Committee report begins at 4:38:10 in the video):
Paul Stephan: I also wanted to switch topics to transportation. Based on the correspondence we’ve gotten from families and hearing from Superintendent of Schools] Mr. [Jason] Bing, seems that there’s a few different issues related to transportation problems this year. There was congestion, there was a problem with when you have tiered routes, once the first route is late, it cascades down.
Some of the routes had to be redone, but also underlying a lot of this was the principle agent problem with BelAir where anytime there’s an issue, the district can’t directly address the problem. It has to go to BelAir. And there’s tension there. And I think that’s an important connection that transportation has with our paraprofessional issues because again, paraprofessionals, now we’re dealing with
Delta-T, we’re dealing with these third party vendors. And when we’re relying on these third parties, there’s sort of two problems. One is it’s a public bidding process. We take the lowest qualified bid and the companies that go out for public bid are not necessarily the best at delivering services. They’re the best at filling out the paperwork and navigating the system. And then there’s a lack of accountability. So when something goes wrong, Mr. Bing, [Assistant Superintendent for Special Services] Ms. [Kathleen] Gesumaria, [Director of Transportation] Ms. [Sandra] Klemser are just on the phone all the time trying to coordinate, and that is a soft cost on district, right? When we talk about doing something in-house versus third party, there’s the hard cost, but there’s all of your time and all of others time in the first month of school that could be used, in my view, in a lot better ways. All this time being spent on these logistical tasks. I know that we’re looking into it. I want us to continue looking into bringing both transportation and paraprofessionals in house. 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. On buses, I want to note, one of the speakers talked about diesel buses and electric buses. As far as I know, no district has all electric.
I would love for us to be the first, but we also don’t need to let the enemy be the perfect of the good. 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 I also want to make people aware there’s an idea right now that’s in a pilot stage, but where, if we had electric buses, we could actually make money over the summer because we would buy the buses, the buses would get power at night when power’s cheaper, and then put it back into the grid at a more expensive rate during the day and you would actually make significant amount of money doing that. Again, PSE&G has to buy into that. So, it’s not quite ready yet, but it’s something I think we ought to look at.
And then of course buying the buses doesn’t get us everything. We have to look at storage and storage of those buses and maintenance. There I would encourage us to talk to our municipal partners, 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. But I think on those two issues, I really want to get us thinking about not just buying vans, but buses and then paraprofessionals as well.
Bimal Kapadia:
Thanks, Paul, on the transportation side. I was hoping that we’d cover it in some other spots and some of the other updates, but I didn’t hear it. So I feel it’s apt to bring this up right now. But when we’re talking about the transportation, and I think it’s really important perspective to share with our community because it’s been brought up so much, because we tend to talk about it as a budget line, we tend to talk about it as a logistical problem, a set of routes, a set of buses, vendor management. But I think we’re missing something really important here that, that 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.
It’s missing stops. It’s not showing up. Nobody seems to know where they are when it’s not, when it’s coming or when it’s not. And we’re asking the students to fend for themselves. Somebody had mentioned earlier in the public speak, this is a dangerous game we’re playing. And this is not delivering goods, right? These are our students. So that’s something that. And by the way, this shouldn’t be a new revelation, right? This has been going on for years. And just this year alone for the community here, we had buses end up on highways. We had buses end up in Milburn, in Springfield, I learned today. Buses running impossible routes that’s resulting not just minutes, these are hours of delays. Parents are unsure where their kids are. So just put yourself in their shoes for a moment, particularly with our SEPAC [Special Education Parents Advisory Committee] community out here.
Think about the anxiety, the risk that we’re putting for our most vulnerable kids and the why, right? And so I guess the question I have for this group here and particularly the board is how many more students need to endure what can sometimes be hours? How many more parents need to miss work, be late for work because of the bus is late, doesn’t come or because, once again, it’s been forced to solve a problem that we haven’t? And how many more millions of dollars, millions, do we have to throw at this to change and to spend if we’re not going to change this? How many more teachers do we have to cut? How many more paraprofessionals do we have to cut? How many more essential services and programs do we have to take away from our classroom?
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. And so we’re not talking about handful students. We’re talking about like hundreds of students and it’s not an occasional bad day. And all tonight when we’re hearing about this and we’re addressing, it’s like we’re ignoring the painful decision, but yet we’re treating transportation and how we’re handling it as sacrosanct. It has to be something that we can affect here because it’s impacting everything else because we’re choosing — everything else can be questioned, everything else can be reduced, everything else can be cut. And what are those? Those are teachers, those are paras, those are programs, those are services, stuff in the classroom. But for some reason we can’t fundamentally reconsider how we are doing this, not getting more buses, not whether we bring it in-house.
It’s not going to solve it. These routes, some of these routes are impossible to do, even if we owned them. It doesn’t matter. So let’s just remember that we as a board, we failed as this oversight and we’ve had this problem for a while and for those that are willing to resist the change or not talk about we’re going to modify, but what are these solutions? We are all failing. And so I’ve said this before and I said this previously, who loses at the end of this day? It’s the students. So let’s be real about it when we’re talking about a comprehensive plan that you’re going to present, but it’s gotta be sustainable, Mr. Bing. And it has to be realistic and it has to be grounded in reality.
Deirdre Brown:
I think, Board member Stefan and Board member Kapadia, I want to build on what you’re saying because both with 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. I would like to really think about what are our committee structures? Are they really focused? I think that’s why I was so stuck on these district goals because we have some fundamental things that we are just not getting right. And I’d really like us to think about, we asked a number of questions about transportation.
We asked about how are you going to pick up these kids in time? How long does a kid have to walk? We asked about the 1099s and we have a good way of asking questions. We do not have a good way of making sure that we are getting accountable, clear responses and timely responses. And I think I would like to call for us to have a special board meeting to discuss are committee structures working? Are our question trackers really working? Are we holding each other and the district accountable in the way that needs to be done? And how are we communicating as a board? Because I think these two things are very clear to me that we are failing.
Meredith Higgins:
I’m actually glad somebody started the apology because I think that’s absolutely right. We have failed. And actually I should just say I, because I cannot speak for anybody else, but it does feel like we have failed. And I do know that there are strides being made in the right direction, but to your point, I would really love to have a dedicated retreat or a meeting that is not any action items, but it’s discussion and trying to figure out we also have to do better. And it’s even in the little things. And an example would be some of the documents we received were less than 72 hours and that is in our bylaws. And our bylaws say that emergent documents, things that are really under a deadline should be provided within 72 hours. All the edits need to be marked out.
I think personnel does an excellent job of graying the items that have been added. So processes around that where it’s like, yes, the district has to move fast and we have to make quick decisions sometimes, but the structures and the way that it’s working, I don’t know is working anymore. So I think a discussion is absolutely worth it.
I do want to go back to transportation for a second, but it’s kind of related to SFA [the Student & Family Affairs Committee] , so I could put a pin in it and wait until committee report. Either way. So it is more of a budget focus, I guess. And to your point, Board Member Kapadia, 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.
They don’t have to be linked. They are linked currently, but they don’t have to be. And I don’t have solutions, but we need to start talking about these basic fundamental needs that we are not meeting and then ask ourselves what is the want that we’ve kind of been incorporating as a mandate, but it isn’t really a mandate. I mean, our county business administrator said, “I don’t know why you guys do courtesy busing.” He said it at our meeting last week and it was like a slap in the face of like, “That’s a really great question.” And I know how difficult it is to move around the two towns and, yes, it would increase congestion, but those are not reasons to not talk about it. We just need to all actually have this discussion because it is really cramping our student style, for lack of a more forward way to say it.
Jeff Bennett:
I have a few things to say about transportation. It’s been a fiasco. Even if most of the buses are okay, the fact that a very large number of buses are chronically late and sometimes buses are an hour late, kids are getting back home at 5:30. It’s just a fiasco and it’s just terrible and it can’t go on. I think the problems with busing this year come in two baskets. There’s a fact that sometimes drivers make mistakes. Sometimes our outsourced partners make mistakes. But also I think we were very ambitious with three-tiered busing. I though we’d be able. I didn’t think as many buses would run actually literally three tiers. I thought the system’s more like three start times. I thought that because last year and the year before we only had four buses serving two middle schools combined and another four serving the high school. So I didn’t think we’d actually need to have that much three-tiered busing. But the way we did that, we split a lot of middle school routes. So we actually …
Bing: Jeff, real quick for the middle school because I got an answer for you. So this is the first year they’re implementing conference time. That’s where the extra buses are coming from.”
Bennett: I think we were too aggressive with the three-tiered busing. But 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.
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. The proximity precedence system, which Mr. Bing started last year, it does have the potential to be better, but we had four cohorts of kids placed by the old system and they have younger siblings. So it’ll take a long time. We have made some moves that actual benefit in the long run. We’re not assigning kids by the Triple I to grade six for this year, but we still have grade seven and eight and they have younger siblings too.
So it’s a while until we see a benefit from that. Perhaps this is something, this really bad start to the year is something we should consider when we look at the two zone model, which is still on the table. Although to be honest with that, it would be much more efficient with busing, but the benefits would take many years to materialize because we have so many cohorts placed by the original system and they all have younger siblings too. So our solution to the mess has been something which is short term. We’ve hired more buses, but the cost is hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that’s not a cushion we have for other problems that are going to occur and our budget for next year.
Anyway, so it’s not an easy solution. Mr. Bing has spent a huge amount of time in it. At the beginning of this meeting you asked me when did we outsource buses? And I was tempted to go on a tangent. So I say, my first term on the board, we never talked about busing. It was just something in the background. Everyone took it for granted. We didn’t get any emails from parents about it too. We ran like clockwork. And, it’s not like today.
I know Mr. Bing has spent an enormous amount of time on busing this for emergencies and regular conversations. And I know it’s actually not what he would like to focus on, but he knows he needs to do it, but there’s no choice. And like he’s mentioned, like Ms. [Ann] Bodnar has spent a lot of time on busing this year too. She’s supposed to be in academics.
Shayna Sackett-Gable:
Just two quick points. On the transportation, I’d be all for revisiting the mileage threshold if it meant better transportation outcomes for students, especially since more students are being placed closer to their homes. And secondly, I hear your points about governance and the efficiency and how we work together on the board. I would just encourage everybody and no one specifically, but just everybody to just take responsibility for the work that we have on our plates currently, and make sure that we’re prioritizing attending meetings, reading through documents so that we have sufficient information because I know that sometimes questions come in and it’s shared already or here’s a document explaining that. So I do think, it’s great to have sound bites to say things in public, but I do think we have to take responsibility behind the scenes, which is where a lot of our work actually happens.
Bimal Kapadia:
For when Jeff said, these things take time, whatever solutions we put in place, we’ve got to start somewhere, right? Even if these things do take some time to fold in place, if you keep doing the same thing every year, you’re not making any progress and all you’re doing is throwing the money away. And again, the students’ outcomes are not going to get better. So if there is a solution that the district proposes and it does take time, that’s okay. No one here is going to pretend that you can snap your fingers and it’s all goingn to be solved next year. Otherwise we would’ve done it already. So let’s not shy away from putting in the work or seeing its returns happen in a few years. You’ve got to start somewhere.
Deirdre Brown:
I agree we could get rid of courtesy busing, but I do not agree that we could get rid of courtesy busing and place students at distance schools. I think these transportation problems are really affecting 15% of our student body because I think, what is it? Close to 80% of our students get their first or second choice school. Or closest school. So we are having these major transportation issues and it’s affecting a small proportion of our student body, but those are basically low-SES kids that were moving to one area and high-SES kids that were moving to another area. And I don’t see how we could think as a board, “Oh, we’re trying to help all students, so we’re gonna move these students across town, but we’re not going to help them get there.” I don’t understand how that’s actually helping students.
And if we wanna talk about saving transportation money, which I’m all about and much rather see money in the classroom, then I think we really need to have a hard look at why are we doing the triple I? What are we trying to achieve? 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. And so I think that is part of the conversation we have to have is why are we doing this? But I don’t think that we could get rid of courtesy busing and then expect students, especially low-income students or free and reduced lunch students to get themselves to school far away and not be able to rely on their community members to help get them to school.
Board President Will Meyer:
I’ll just step in here for a second. I am also of the opinion that we cannot remove courtesy transportation while we have our triple I integration program in place. 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.
I think we have to be creative and hopefully the lessons we’ve had this year, things that are not working can inform what we can do in the next couple years, as we need to save money, but also have the, the mandate to keep our schools integrated, which is a separate merit to what the Fergus recommendations are, which are also crucially important. I mean, they go side by side together. But I think we need to look at what we have already put in place and the modifications that are hopefully making a difference. Certainly continue to see, are there other modifications that are going to facilitate easier placements, streamlined busing, knowing that it’s going to be incremental? But I don’t see this as a reason, or dare I say, excuse to wind this back without cause otherwise.
Other comments right now?
Jason Bing:
I do. And we’ve been saying this for quite some time. I know [Business Administrator] Nicole [Schoening] will have better numbers probably within the month to share in regards to projections. 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. We’ve done line by line for two years now. We can’t do it anymore. We have contract negotiations coming up at the end of this year, not only SOMEA [the teachers and staff union], but also ASCA [the administrators union]. We’re there. So there’s gotta be a realization, and I’ll emphasize with, Bimal just noted, these difficult conversations have been kicked like a can for almost 20 years.
We can’t keep ticking them down the road. You’re looking at massively larger class sizes, massively less staff. That’s what we’re looking at right now. And 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. So, I feel like I’m a parrot here with these difficult conversations, but that’s the reality we’re in. So we are gonna have to make some very difficult decisions moving forward. We had to make some very difficult decisions last year. We borrowed money from John to pay Mary the year before to balance the budget. And we were very clear about that. We have no more savings. And John [Ferraro] noted, our [Essex] County BA [business administrator], that we have to build up our savings.
So not only are we facing drastic cuts, we also don’t have any savings. We’re just not in a good place. After 20 years, this is where we’re at. So we’re going to have to make some decisions. And I agree with some of the comments that were made that we’ve got to do a lot better in regards to our communication of those decisions moving forward. But these decisions are going to have to be made. That’s just the bottom line.
(The bolded text is Village Green’s emphasis, not the speakers’ emphasis, and highlights text that was used for quotes in a reported story here.)
