Gregory D. Evans | Ex-Hacker | TV Personality | Author

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Ana Paula Cruz doesn’t drive, and her husband uses their car to get to work. So the family treasured the courtesy bus that took their older child to her elementary school while Cruz walked her younger child to another school in their South Orange-Maplewood school district.

But just days before the new school year started this month, Cruz learned that the district canceled the courtesy bus service. She spent $32 on an Uber ride to get her fifth grader to school on opening day, then grabbed another Uber to get her youngest to a different school.

“We get no transportation, and our kids don’t get to attend a school that is closer. That makes no sense,” said Cruz.

The school district’s decision to end courtesy busing, and how it was handled, upset many who relied on the bus service – and has become swept up into an ongoing debate that has embroiled parents and administrators over the district’s ambitious effort to integrate its schools, illustrating the potential minefields that New Jersey districts face as they address their often highly segregated student bodies.

In a pending 2018 lawsuit against the New Jersey Department of Education, Latino Civic Action and the NAACP contended that public schools in the state are segregated racially and economically and that the state has failed to fix the issue. A superior court judge heard arguments in March, and a ruling is imminent.

South Orange-Maplewood’s integration plan has drawn the ire of some parents because it is far more restrictive than a similar plan that Montclair – another suburban commuter community in Essex County – has used since the 1980s. While Montclair lets parents rank schools by preference, the South Orange-Maplewood system assigns schools to new elementary students based strictly on an algorithm.

The loss of courtesy buses, meanwhile, sent South Orange and Maplewood parents scurrying to change work schedules and find carpools. Some have not been able to find a permanent remedy.

New Jersey only requires districts to provide busing for elementary students who live more than 2 miles from school. As a result of prior desegregation initiatives, the South Orange-Maplewood district had been providing additional courtesy buses to several groups of students who lived between 1 and 2 miles away from school.

A district spokesperson said 90 children had received courtesy busing, but school board president Thair Joshua told the community in July that 127 students were impacted.

The decision to end courtesy busing was made at an April 2021 board meeting. This gave parents more than a year to prepare, according to former board member Annemarie Maini. But parents say there was no communication or letters to remind them of the key change to transportation policy until July 5. The July email from the district to parents said they should have been notified on June 16 but did not because of a technical error. Cruz did not hear about the change until late August.

The board of education has tried to separate discussion about the busing cancellation from debate over its school integration program, but board members have made comments saying that retaining buses for these 90 children would cause “inequity” since new students within the same 1- to 2-mile distance who go to schools based on the integration algorithm don’t qualify for courtesy busing.

And in a March 2021 email to Jeffrey Bennett, an education blogger and parent whose children are impacted by the busing change, district Superintendent Ronald Taylor said sunsetting the busing program helped plan for integration, because it “allows for us the space to redesign and bid our transportation needs” which “will definitely be impacted by the outcome of our Intentional Integration Initiative.”

Parents have said the issue could have been resolved by adding busing for the children affected by the integration plan, not taking it away from the other students.

“This should not be an insurmountable barrier and the district should find ways to make that right for those parents,” said Stefan Lallinger, who heads the Bridges Collaborative, an integration initiative at The Century Foundation, a progressive Washington think tank.

“The busing issue to me is a minor issue, but minor issues have the ability to derail much larger things,” Lallinger said. Integration plans like the one in the South Orange-Maplewood district were a “fairly successful model” nationally, he said.

Many in the community – which has been largely supportive of integration plans — thought the district would either allow students to transfer to schools that were easier to get to or create new bus routes. The district did neither.

When she learned the courtesy bus would no longer be available, Cruz tried to see if one of her children could attend Clinton elementary, a 10-minute walk from her house. But the district has a “no exceptions” policy for transfer, updated after the integration initiative, that refuses to consider parental hardship – even if the hardship involved child care needs, transportation or work hours.

District policy does not consider losing transportation as a hardship. “Hardship is arbitrary,” said Joshua, the board president, when asked why the district will not give these parents any leeway in its “no exceptions” transfer policy.

The district said that it does not have funds to return to the old bus system or expand busing to include children affected by the integration plan this year. “We can’t afford it,” said Joshua.

“All I’m asking is that my daughter get on a bus or switch her school,” said Cruz. “But they’re denying us both of those things.”

Rolling out integration plan

The district is in the second year of its three-year “Intentional Integration Initiative.” The system assigns new elementary students each year to a school using a random number generated by an algorithm based on income, education level, race, siblings and school proximity. Parents do not have a choice about which school their children attend. The goal is to make each school closely reflect the district as a whole, according to its website. The district has seven elementary and two middle schools.

Some 54% of the district’s students are white, 25% are Black and 9% are Hispanic, according to the Department of Education. Nearly 11% of students are economically disadvantaged.

The school district has said that in its first year, the integration initiative reduced income gaps across schools.

In the Seth Boyden elementary school, 73% of kindergartners came from economically disadvantaged backgrounds before the initiative began. That dropped to 37% after the initiative’s first year.

And by sending more lower-income students from the Seth Boyden neighborhood to schools across the district, the number of students in all grades at Boyden from economically disadvantaged backgrounds fell to 5% compared to 43% the year before.

Many of the parents who lost courtesy busing this year have children who don’t attend the elementary school closest to them because the district mixes some of its K-5 students among two elementary schools, as part of a 1970s integration requirement that resulted in children being bused from a majority-white neighborhood in Maplewood to a school in a majority-black neighborhood in South Orange and vice versa, according to Joshua, the board president. For parents with a child in each school – and who live between the two schools – the morning drop-offs can be nightmarish in traffic.

Hazardous routes

Parents argue that ending bus service to those who had courtesy bus service in the past and denying it to those affected by the integration initiative forces these elementary school children to walk to school on sometimes dangerous routes.

Many feel the district did not do its due diligence to designate some walking routes as hazardous after it ended courtesy busing, which would have provided crossing guards on those streets.

Cruz’s 10-year-old daughter “would have to walk through streets that have no sidewalks as well as streets without a crossing guard,” she wrote in an email to the superintendent.

“The board is not responsible for determining hazardous routes” under state law, Joshua said in an interview. “The board did coordinate with the town and asked for reevaluation,” he said, but they were informed that routes did not need to be updated. Joshua said in a subsequent email that the board had conversations with local police, municipal engineers and other departments in town.

Joshua said he is not aware of any new routes being designated as “hazardous.”

‘My hands are tied’

Many parents who had gathered outside the Delia Bolden Elementary School in Maplewood on the first day of class said they supported the district integration plan.

Some said they had thought that aspects of the plan, such as its “no exceptions” transfer policy, should have been debated more transparently. One parent pointed to nearby Montclair, where an integration program that allows parents to rank schools by preference has been in effect since the 1980s.

A petition to restore the courtesy busing program has more than 1,700 signatures – and mentions the Montclair program.

“Rather than give unbused kids a bus, the board took away busing,” said Bennett. People were very supportive of the integration algorithm when it was approved in 2020, he said, but its “prohibition of transfers is cruel.”

Cruz, the mother who took Ubers to school on the first day, said she’s delighted that her 7-year-old has nearly overcome her speech delay after joining the district. “The education was the only reason we moved here,” she said.

“According to the school’s mapping system, I am 1.9 miles away, but on Google maps, I live 2.1 miles away” from school, she said – just far enough to qualify for a school bus under state rules. She had hoped the difference in the school’s calculation and Google was small enough that the district would approve a school bus for at least one of her two elementary schoolers.

Cruz, whose husband works in another school district, said Wednesday that she had spent $187 in the five days since school reopened to get her children to and from school.

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