Island Park should change its busing

To the Editor:

As an Island Park parent and taxpayer, I am very disappointed with the recently proposed draft school budget. Specifically, the draft budget proposes unnecessary cuts in core areas of education, and fails to make necessary and available cuts in other non-core areas such as busing. 

The Island Park School District proposed to eliminate two elementary teacher positions, cut the curriculum director position to part time and make other cuts that will increase class size and impact the education of my children and others in the district. At the same time, they propose no real changes to the ridiculous amount of busing that the district currently provides.

The district currently provides a bus to nearly every child. For example, I live within a few hundred feet of the Francis X. Hegarty Elementary School and the school bus will pick up my second and fourth grade boys. This is absurd. 

Last year, the district hired a well-known transportation consultant to consider busing alternatives. When he gave the results of his study at a meeting, he said that he is unaware of any school district in Nassau, Suffolk or Westchester that provides as much busing as Island Park. He found that if the district simply limited busing to those students who had to cross Austin Boulevard to attend school, that one change would save taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. With this modest change, we would not have to cut any teachers and our district would still provide more busing than most districts in the area. For example, Oceanside provides no busing at all for students after ninth grade.    

While the change in busing proposed by our consultant would require a public vote, I am confident that it would pass and have no impact on the budget vote, which may occur at the same time. While some may resist these changes, in these times difficult choices need to be made, and our district should not be afraid to do what's right.

Richard S. Schurin

Island Park