Sabini says stop school bus cuts

Senator John Sabini has called on the Department of Education (DOE) to postpone or cancel a plan to remove 250 city school bus routes in January.
The cuts, which will eliminate 94 school bus routes in Queens, will now go into effect on Monday, January 29, after Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Shirley Kornreich gave the plan the green light on Friday, December 1.
Kornreich's decision also overturned a previous court injunction delaying the cuts, which had originally been scheduled to take effect on Monday, December 4. The school bus companies, who filed for the injunction, still plan to sue the DOE to stop or postpone the cuts, according to published reports.
The plan, which would save an estimated $20 million that the DOE says they plan to reinvest in city schools, has also drawn criticism from parent groups. P.S. 13 Parent Teacher Association (PTA) President Karina McPherran pointed to an estimate of 40,000 children thought to need bus service whose parents have not yet responded to the registration form sent home in the kids' backpacks.
&#8220This is unfair to many parents,” McPherran said at a press conference outside P.S. 13 in Elmhurst. Although McPherran's two sons - in fifth and seventh grades - are ineligible for the bus service, she said that she had heard about the cuts through a notice sent to the PTA office.
&#8220Cutting many school bus routes, especially now, is a bad idea. Many parents rely on these buses for their kids, and many of the affected children are special education students who can't take a regular public bus like everyone else,” she said.
&#8220There's a little bit of an Oliver Twist feel to this, that they [the DOE] would do this in the dead of winter,” Sabini said.
Sabini said that the cuts disproportionately affect certain areas in Queens, where many immigrants reside. District 30, in which P.S. 13 is located, will lose 20 school bus routes, and in District 24, which encompasses much of northern Queens including Flushing and Long Island City, 18 routes will be cut.
Although the DOE has said that the notice was made available in English as well as eight other languages, Sabini said that the form sent home to notify parents that they could access the information in other languages was in English.
&#8220Letters have to go home in a way that parents understand it,” he said.
The DOE has said that they plan to keep reaching out to parents and collecting registration forms for the school bus service until Friday, December 22.