The Lakewood Board of Education is set to hold a special meeting Wednesday afternoon to address courtesy busing and hazardous routes, a potentially significant discussion coming just weeks after a transportation funding crisis left thousands of local families facing sharply higher costs for non-mandated school busing.
The special session is scheduled for Wednesday, Sept. 9, at 4:30 p.m., with the Board expected to discuss transportation for students attending nonpublic schools and, in particular, how Lakewood’s policies governing roads deemed hazardous should be applied under New Jersey law.
The issue could have significant implications in Lakewood, where thousands of children who live within the state mileage limits for mandatory transportation nevertheless travel along heavily trafficked roads that the district itself has formally classified as hazardous.
“A hazardous road is hazardous regardless of what school a child attends,” the Board said, emphasizing that student safety and consistent application of transportation policy will be central to the discussion.
The Board could take formal action during Wednesday’s meeting.
The distinction between mandated transportation, courtesy busing and hazardous-route transportation has taken on heightened importance following the turmoil surrounding Lakewood’s non-mandated busing program ahead of the new school year.
Under New Jersey law, transportation is generally mandated for elementary students in grades K-8 who live more than two miles from school and high school students who live more than 2½ miles away. Nonpublic-school students who live within those distances are not automatically entitled under state law to regular transportation, although districts and transportation agencies may provide what is commonly known as courtesy or subscription busing.
But New Jersey law separately addresses districts that choose to provide courtesy transportation and have children who must walk along hazardous routes.
Under N.J.S.A. 18A:39-1.5, a school district providing courtesy busing is required to adopt a policy concerning students who must walk to or from school along hazardous routes. That policy must identify hazardous routes within the district requiring courtesy busing and establish the criteria used to determine which roads qualify.
State law provides a lengthy list of factors that districts may consider when making that determination, including traffic volume, vehicle speeds, population density, whether adequate sidewalks exist, blind curves, steep inclines, nearby drop-offs, bridges and overpasses, railroad tracks and busy roads or highways that children would be required to cross. Municipal officials are also supposed to work with the school district in establishing the criteria used to designate hazardous routes.
Lakewood already maintains an extensive official list of roads that the Board of Education has determined to be hazardous.
The district’s current student transportation regulation states: “For safety purposes, District policy prohibits students from crossing roads deemed to be hazardous.” It further provides that no bus route may be established in violation of that policy and that students may not be permitted to ride a bus contrary to the policy.
The district’s hazardous-road list includes Route 9, Route 70, Cedar Bridge Avenue, County Line Road, Cross Street, Hope Chapel Road, New Hampshire Avenue, Pine Street, Prospect Street, Squankum Road, Vermont Avenue, James Street, Joe Parker Road, Chestnut Street, Clifton Avenue, Forest Avenue, Oak Street and numerous other heavily traveled Lakewood roads.
That existing policy is expected to loom large over Wednesday’s discussion: If the district has formally determined that children cannot safely cross certain roads, how should that safety determination affect transportation for a student who lives within the ordinary two-mile or 2½-mile threshold?
The issue is particularly consequential for Lakewood because its transportation system operates on a scale unlike virtually anywhere else in New Jersey.
A state-commissioned review of the Lakewood school district found that in fiscal year 2024, transportation or transportation funding covered 40,958 students. Of those, 35,769 were nonpublic-school students, including 9,510 classified as receiving courtesy transportation. Another 4,281 were public-school students, including 1,779 courtesy riders.
The same state review found that the Lakewood Student Transportation Authority transports roughly 25,000 mandated nonpublic-school students and approximately 10,000 nonpublic students receiving courtesy busing each year. It noted that Lakewood’s nonpublic transportation obligation dwarfs that of other New Jersey districts even when courtesy busing is excluded.
The issue exploded into public view last month when Lakewood families were initially informed that the cost of non-mandated transportation through the LSTA would jump from $385 to $945 per student for the 2026-27 school year following the loss of funding that had helped support courtesy transportation.
For a family with several children using courtesy busing, the increase threatened to translate into thousands of dollars in additional annual transportation expenses.
After days of meetings involving LSTA, government officials, askanim and representatives of Igud Hamosdos, the additional charge was dramatically reduced. Igud Hamosdos subsequently informed local mosdos that families would instead be required to pay an additional $290 per student and urged parents to opt into the transportation program.
Even with that immediate crisis eased, however, the episode left unresolved a much broader question: Which children are properly classified as ordinary courtesy riders, and how should students whose routes to school involve roads already officially determined to be hazardous be treated?
New Jersey Department of Education guidance makes clear that simply living along a hazardous route does not, by itself, create the same statewide entitlement to free transportation as meeting the statutory mileage requirements. The state says boards are not generally required to provide busing solely because a student lives less than the mandated distance but faces hazardous conditions.
At the same time, once a district provides courtesy busing, state law requires it to maintain a hazardous-route policy, identify the routes requiring courtesy transportation and establish objective standards governing those determinations.
That distinction is likely to be critical Wednesday.
The discussion is also expected to focus on whether those safety standards are being applied uniformly. The central concern is straightforward: A roadway that the district has determined is too dangerous for one child to cross does not become less dangerous because another child attends a different type of school.
New Jersey’s own nonpublic transportation guidance states that nonpublic students living within the mandatory mileage thresholds may receive courtesy transportation in accordance with the policies adopted by their resident district board of education. The state also permits a board or coordinated transportation services agency to charge parents for some or all of that transportation, subject to statutory restrictions.
For Lakewood, where the overwhelming majority of school-age children attend nonpublic schools and where major arteries such as Route 9, County Line Road, Cedar Bridge Avenue and Cross Street carry substantial traffic, the practical consequences of how the hazardous-route policy is interpreted could be considerable.
Wednesday’s meeting therefore comes at a particularly sensitive moment for the community’s school transportation system. What began several weeks ago as a dispute over the price of courtesy busing is now raising a more fundamental question about how Lakewood determines which children can safely be expected to walk to school.
The Board’s discussion could clarify whether changes are necessary in the district’s current approach and whether transportation policies involving hazardous roads are being applied consistently to public- and nonpublic-school students.
For parents whose children live within the normal mileage limits but would otherwise have to navigate roads Lakewood itself has deemed hazardous, Wednesday’s meeting could prove especially consequential.
At its core, the issue before the Board is not simply how far a child lives from school, but what that child would actually encounter along the way.
As the Board put it, “A hazardous road is hazardous regardless of what school a child attends.”
{Matzav.com}
