The Lakewood Student Transportation Authority is under pressure: The non-profit that provides buses for 50,000 non-public students—up by 2,500 from last year—-to get to and from 160 or so local Jewish day schools has a budget shortfall of $2 million. Luckily, the township has offered a loan. State taxpayers, through Lakewood Public Schools District’s budget, provides most of the annual cost, about $25 million.

According to LSTA’s IRS 990 form, LSTA Director Avraham Krawiec made $228,024 in 2020, the most recent public disclosure available.

The Asbury Park Press notes today that, as ultra-Orthodox children move into surrounding townships like Jackson, Brick, Howell, and Toms River, legislators are proposing the districts collaborate on busing to save money:

“If the proposed bill is approved, other districts could join together to better streamline busing for non-public school students statewide, using the LSTA as a model, according to Assemblyman Louis Greenwald, D-Camden, a co-sponsor.”

There’s one glitch: Students who attend ultra-Orthodox yeshivas are not permitted to go to schools or even ride a bus with students of the opposite gender. In fact, yeshiva culture is such that parents don’t want their children—either boys or girls–to be on the same bus as someone who attends a different yeshiva. Last year LTSA “congratulated” two yeshivas, Yeshiva Torah Emes and Yeshiva Mesoras Haftorah, on agreeing to combine their routes.

This refusal to collaborate increases costs, of course—parents have pointed out that there are many empty seats on buses—and also presents an obstacle to the cost-savings proposal from state legislators. Sure, if Toms River (where private school busing is “exploding,”) shared a bus route to a boy’s yeshiva in Lakewood with Lakewood students, that would be efficient. Yet how will that work, given the restraints on collaboration?

In an wonderful article for the Jewish Insider, Gabby Deutch writes,

“Nowhere is this more evident than in Lakewood’s K-to-12 school system, which is not a system so much as a loosely connected network of hundreds of separate boys’ and girls’ schools. [Rabbi Aaron]Kotler, who is perhaps the strongest booster of a bigger and more business-savvy Lakewood, ascribes to the system a particularly American ideology. ‘It’s entirely free market,’ he argued. ‘You move here, you want to open a yeshiva, you can. And if you can raise the money or put together the money and you can get the parents to send their kids, you’ll be successful.’”

Getting yeshiva students safely to and from school is a problem that must be solved. Yet the solutions aren’t as obvious as the State Legislature would like to believe.