Suppose there are single-sex private schools in a town. The school board provides busing for these schools. As a function of the fact that the schools are segregated by gender, the buses transporting the children are also segregated by gender. Is this a legitimate discrimination/segregation issue?
Here’s a link. There are underlying issues that go beyond the segregation here - it’s a fight over the school budget, really. But I’m wondering if this particular gambit has anything going for it.
Of course not. They’re private schools; unless they’re the only schools available in town, or the only schools that some segment of the population is able to attend, there’s not a shred of public policy attached to them. And as long as they’re separate schools, with separate start times, the busing is simply a matter of practicality. The opponents of busing private school students are trying to create an issue that will force an end to the busing.
The issue on the busing is whether the school district’s bus service to certain schools is disproportionate to the service to other schools. Specifically, 72% of bus-riding Orthodox school students are bused at the expense of the school district (which doesn’t have to bus them at all), as opposed to 25% of other private school students. If this is solely because of the distance between home and school, I doubt there’s a case in any of these arguments; certainly it would all be forestalled by a contract between schools and the district to pay for the busing, but the opponents won’t delay their petition long enough for that to happen.
My first thought: If it’s a private school, then it’s the school’s private busses too, no? If we can segregate on private property in schools like Dematha, why can’t we also segregate on the schools’ private transportation vehicles? In that light it doesn’t seem like a valid complaint. It also seems to be the most practical way to do things- each bus has only one destination.
So the bottom line is who owns the busses? This is the first I’ve heard of private schools using publicly funded busses. I didn’t think local governments provided any kind of assistance to private schools because of the whole establishment clause thing. But if these are public school busses, then the school should have no say in who boards them.
Seems to me that the Lakewood BOE providing any kind of bussing is the bigger issue (and I see that CAPS raises this issue in the article).
I can’t imagine that there are deliberate policies that distinguish in this regard - everyone fills out standard forms. It makes sense that it has to do with distance from home. The general population tends to attend public school. This means that there are fewer private schools serving a large area, meaning that the average distance to school is quite high. For the OJ community, all kids go to private school, meaning that there are more private schools distributed throughout the neighborhoods, and the average distance to school is less.
Attrayant, not only is school board busing for private schools legal, it is mandated by NJ State Law IF similar busing is provided to public schools (see link). This has forced opponents of private school busing to push for a stop to all busing (their constituency tends to be clustered in areas close to the public schools). From a legal perspective the focus has been on other issues, hence the segregation issue.
FTR, public school board busing of parochial school students is the rule in the New Orleans area. Few think twice about it.
Some bigger schools have their own private busses, but not many.