With the carpooling drill underway this morning, the Lakewood Police Department as well as other emergency services have geared up for what could be a nightmare.
Lakewood Police Chief Rob Lawson tells TLS that Lakewood Police Officers are staging at many key intersections around town to ensure the flow of traffic isn’t interrupted and that intersections aren’t blocked.
Officers will man close to twenty key intersections, including intersections along the Route 9 and Route 88 corridors, Clifton Avenue and others.
In addition to the officers being utilized from the Traffic & Safety and School Resource departments, Sheriff’s officers from the Ocean County Sheriff Department will be on hand to assist with the traffic, the Police Chief said.
As of 8:30AM, TLS was reporting that buses are pulling up at stops and leaving empty. Bus stops usually packed with children are reported to be empty. Roads are expected to become heavy soon.
As YWN reported earlier this week, parents with children in all of Lakewood’s Mosdos are being strongly urged to participate in the carpooling drill, which Askonim and Roshei Yeshivah are strongly supporting.
As it stands, the current BOE budget does not cover transportation for students, if they live within a 2 ½ mile radius.
Through numerous meetings that took place the past 2 weeks, an idea was formulated to have the drill which will have all parents send their children to school without BOE transportation whereby simulating what a morning would look like without any bus transportation. The goal of the drill is to prepare parents, students, township and emergency personnel on what a typical day without transportation would look like.
(Chaim Shapiro – YWN)
Join the official YWN WhatsApp status
17 Responses
In Baltimore we have never had buses. We managed. We made it through every day. Things change. Stop complaining and come up with a plan to deal.
Sad that a city that is supposed to be a makon torah has no issues with simple derech eretz or chilul hashem. Disgraceful, but then again, par for the course. The typical lakewood “ess kumpt mir” attitude.
There IS BUS FUNDING. Someone chose to spend it on other areas in the budget.
BoysWork You are a fool. There are plenty of hard working people in Lakewood who pay exorbitant taxes to pay for PS kids to get everything for free. We all know what would happen if tomorrow morning all kids signed up for PS. All we ask in return for supporting the schools are Public Buses.
Stop with your hatred to a community made up of pretty much Brooklyn/Monsey/Baltimore/Detroit and every other city in the USA.
duvidl, are you saying that Baltimore has 25,000+ schoolchildren attending yeshivos and Bais Yaakovs? I thought not.
Why do people here always think they’re smarter than the people on the spot?
duvdl & BoysWork: This exercise is to simulate what it would be like once the service stops. No one is telling them to cause extra delays. The residents of Lakewood pay school tax (I assume; I am not from Lakewood) their children should be entitled to bus service.
😉
#1 How do you compare Lakewood with probably about 50 full classes per grade in elementary with the few (kain yirbu) number of classes in Baltimore?
#2 where do you see lack of derech eretz or chilul hashem? While there is room for improvement, the overall middos of Lakewood compare favorably with most Yiddishe USA cities, not to mention non Jewish ones.
I think the comments here are a bit harsh — look, many of these people work very hard by accepting food stamps and rent subsidies, medicaid and wic. The least the local government can do for them is to provide them with free busing to their schools. I don’t see what the big deal is.
This is what carpool means in Baltimore. It means leaving your other kids home alone in the mornings waiting for their carpools to come while you’re out driving carpool to another school, it means driving a few days after having a baby since its impossible to switch out so many carpools, it means stopping in middle of the road to pick up kids since baltimore has many one way narrow roads, it means endangering children’s lives when they need to enter the car thru the door facing traffic as cars whiz by, it means backed up traffic for miles especially along park Heights and Greenspring and all major intersections along those streets since every school uses the same streets to get to school, it means driving thru the snow in vans that are not built to drive in snow, it means shoveling out your driveway and clearing your car to get your kids to school on time in the snow, it means working less hours to drive carpool, it means ridiculously high gas bills, it means dangerous parking lots with cars going in all directions, in and out of slots while kids are crossing to the cars, it means waiting on long lines trying to get in and out of the parking lots, it means giving up an hour erev shabbos and erev shavuos to pick up carpool, it means coming back from an out of town chasunah on time to be back for carpool because nobody could switch with you since they all have other carpools the same day, it means handling 10 middle school boys at 5:45 after a long day in yeshiva, it means buckling 7 preschoolers into booster seats for the 2:30 preschool pick up, it means driving 7:00 minyan carpool for the middle school boys and leaving the other kids at home alone expecting them to be ready for school when you get home at 8, it means changing all your plans for the day when school suddenly lets out early on a snow day and your boss won’t let you leave and your little kids are getting out at the same time and will have no one at home to watch them . . . I could go on and on but I think you get the point. Our lives revolve aroung carpool. Yet we don’t throw tantrums, stage protests and make utter fools out of ourselves in front of the umos ha’olam who are all watching this and shaking their heads. It’s one thing to protest for kavod shamayim, the goyim look up to us when we fight for Torah, but carpool?? Seriously?? You’ll get what you want if you block traffic and honk your horns and scream and shout for long enough, just like many 2 year olds and “prove” how much trouble carpooling is causing you but at what cost, a chilul Hashem? Life as a yid shouldn’t be hard, it should be as easy as possible and the umos ha’olam have to do whatever they can to make our lives as comfortable as possible. This is one of the few times that I am embarressed for my nation.
Judging favorably,and in this case correctly,is of prime importance.A little hilly town with small and angling streets and thousands of children going to and fro cannot be compared to a large city with wide streets and a much smaller Yeshivish population.Lakewood traffic will be impossible with carpooling. I’m sure that in any event bussing is helpful everywhere.As for working,having to drive children to school wreaks havoc to a work day.Standing up for ones rights and showing the problem has no connection to Chillul Hashem and is quite the opposite.From what I learnt from
Rav N. Bulman Zt”l, l believe he would have approved of this.Again, even most big cities (N.Y.,Chicago and I believe Toronto)have bussing and the situation in L.A.,which might have some but certainly not enough is simply geferlach.The final point is the tremendously higher proportion of accidents that could occur r”l from having more drivers out there ,often inexperienced with the route and it’s special features,and drop off at schools,which I have much experience with, is much safer
with buses than carpool.
duvdl #1: Suburban Baltimore doesn’t have a large concentration of private school students from large families with many children in a small area each being driven through traffic each morning by every parent in town.
There are too many Jewish Uncle Toms.
Many people here pretend as if the choice is one between busing and carpools. BUT, there’s also an option of busing paid for by parents, and so the choice is between the city paying for private school busing, or the parents paying. Of course busing is an additional expense, like is tuition and books and lunches and field trips….
Is it fair to ask the city to also pay for lunches? or books and binders and field trips? Why is busing different?
“There are plenty of hard working people in Lakewood who pay exorbitant taxes to pay for PS kids to get everything for free.”
This is not unique to Lakewood. Private school parents all across the country do the same. Public school parents are required to attend the local PS in their district/zone, especially if they want transportation. Would you like to be subjected to the same rules and only be allowed to send your kid to the yeshiva in your district? As a taxpayer in Lakewood, do you know how the board of education allocates its budget? How much comes in, and where it is spent? I’m sure there is plenty of wasteful spending. Take it out on the members of the BOE.
“We all know what would happen if tomorrow morning all kids signed up for PS.”
Yes we do, nothing, because we know nobody is sending their kids to PS. The politicians and members of the BOE know this too. You must come up with a better argument for your bus request.
“All we ask in return for supporting the schools are Public Buses.”
Are you familiar with the BOE budget? How it funds its budget? How the BOE was prepared to fund things like “public buses” and how the State turned down that request?
Had the state granted the waiver, above the 2% cap, nobody would be talking about busing. Everyone instead would be grumbling when their new property tax bills arrived in the mail. The conversation should not focus on busing, it should focus on the overall spending by the district and how the money is spent.
this ruling effect all even puplic school kids I assume who live within 2.5 miles from their school why the out cry only from the frum. simple, give me, give me, give me.
Shouldn’t the bus drill only have included families living within a 2 1/2 mile radius? This doesn’t accurately show the effects of the budget next year.
In most municpalities (NYC is different) especially the Suburbs, local property taxes pay for schools and school services, while there is some money from the state , its usually for educational purposes (like Teachers or new textbooks), State money never pays for busing
The Busing money soley comes from property taxes and its not free, the drivers must get paid, there are expenses like gasoline and insurance.
SOme seem to think the buses are Free, they are not, someone must pay for them, since there is a defecit in the Lakewood school district they must either cut services or raise taxes (Difficult in a poor neighborhood)