However, several BOE members have already made their opposition known, even without seeing offers or financial figures.
The Evesham Township School District Board of Education has begun to explore the potential privatization of the district’s busing services.
At this week’s BOE meeting, the board approved a $13,500 contract with TransPar Group for consulting services regarding the current, district-run busing services.
TransPar Group would examine the district’s current services and eventually write a bid package. Private providers of school busing services could then potentially offer bids of service at costs that might be less than what the district currently pays to run its own services.
Yet despite the board just beginning the process, several members of the nine-member board have already publicly voiced varying degrees of opposition to any plan to privatize the district’s busing services, even before seeing any offers or financial figures from private organizations.
Board member Janis Knoll, who sits on the board’s finance committee, said she agreed to have the board explore possible bids and potential cost savings, but overall, the situation made her “very nervous.”
Knoll cited concerns about the potentially high turnover rate for employees in the private busing industry and the needs of the district’s children to have stability in their drivers.
“I’m fine with going out for a bid just to see, but it’s going to have to be a huge differential for me to want to do this,” Knoll said.
Board member Dennis Mehigan, who also sits on the board’s finance committee, said that while he understood why the idea was being proposed, he also ultimately would not support the proposal.
“There are a lot of intangibles, and I’m an accountant telling you that,” Mehigan said. “That has to be considered.”
For similar reasons to Knoll and Mehigan, board members Lea Ryan and Nichole Stone also said they were against privatizing the district’s busing services.
Several members of the board even discussed the possibility of simply not approving the $13,500 consulting contract with the TransPar Group and forgo looking at any potential bids the district might receive.
Yet board president Joe Fisicaro Jr. said it was the board’s duty to examine any potential cost savings, especially when the district is facing an estimated $9 million in cuts to state aid in the next several years.
“I spent most of my career here railing against privatization, there’s no secret to that … we can’t not just do the due diligence,” Fisicaro said.
Members of the district’s transportation staff also made their voices heard at the meeting.
Several drivers and employees of the transportation department shared numerous anecdotes and cited the personalized care and attention children receive when a school district directly employs its own drivers and staff.
Staff members spoke of drivers and staff having buses return to schools to pick up children who might have missed a bus.
The also mentioned keeping a student on a bus if their parent or guardian isn’t home during their normal drop-off time, only to circle back to that home several times during the driver’s route to ensure someone is there to receive a child once they leave the bus.
“Your contractors are not going to do that, and that’s just the bottom line,” ETSD bus driver Rose Nero said.
Another ETSD bus driver to speak at the meeting was Janina Shedaker, who recalled an incident involving a non-English speaking kindergartener on her bus who began to choke on a hard candy.
“As I’m pulling away from the school, I hear her gasping for air,” Shedaker said as she began to recall the story through tears. “If there was a private contractor driving who didn’t know that child and didn’t know how old she was, because she was tall for a kindergartener, and didn’t know that she didn’t speak English — that child could have died. I had to perform CPR on that child. That changed my perspective of this job. I love these kids like their my own.”
Also to speak at the meeting was Deborah VanCuren, president of the Evesham Township Education Association.
VanCuren said members were also concerned about the discussions regarding privatization.
“Our transportation department does a fabulous job of getting our students to and from school each day,” VanCuren said. “Our special education students and our ESL (English as a Second Language) students especially need bus drivers who are willing to go the extra mile.”
Although the board ultimately approved the consulting contract, the board did not state when any potential bid package would be ready for release.
