We, the undersigned, residents of the Washingtonville Central School District, whose children attend nonpublic schools in the Village of Kiryas Joel and are legally entitled to transportation under Education Law § 3635 (1), hereby request that the Washingtonville Central School District immediately terminate the current transportation arrangement with Orange County Transit, LLC for breach of the company’s contract with the School District, on the following grounds:

• Orange County Transit has failed to provide a safe means of transportation to our children’s schools. In one instance, a child was left unattended for hours on a hot bus at great threat to their physical, mental, and emotional safety. The company has also refused to provide interpreters who can communicate with our children, many of whom are English as a second language learners. This has resulted in unsafe situations where our children cannot understand the instructions being given to them.
• Under the School District’s contract, Orange County Transit is required to ensure that the children arrive no later than 10 minutes after the bell time at their nonpublic schools. That did not occur during the past school year. Numerous complaints have been made by parents who send their children to the Kiryas Joel nonpublic schools using the District’s transportation that the children are arriving in school as long as 30 minutes after the bell time. As a result, the children are losing important educational instruction time due to the School District’s failure to enforce the contract specification.
• The School District’s contract also provides that that the bus company is to have a vehicle by the school no later than 15 minutes before the bell time for dismissal to take the children back home.  But that did not occur regularly during the past school year. As a result, the children have arrived home as long as an hour and a half after dismissal time.
• The District’s contract requires that the operator not commingle children from another contract on the same bus. Orange County Transit is in fact comingling children that are attending nonpublic schools and children that are under 5 years old who are not entitled to transportation from the District on the same bus, in violation of the agreement, causing the routes for the covered children attending nonpublic schools to be delayed.
• Orange County Transit also refused to provide transportation for children attending schools when the dismissal time is after 6:15 p.m., which is at times the case for the Jewish nonpublic schools. This places a much greater burden on parents to provide their own transportation to the children attending these schools.
• Under the New York COVID-19 guidelines, social distancing should be practiced on buses that are transporting children to and from school, and all buses should carry no more than half of the usual capacity unless there are siblings sitting together. The School District has not enforced these rules with Orange County Transit.

Also, as a community that is paying annually over 3 Million dollars in school taxes while we are not utilizing ANY of the school services and/or facilities with the exception of transportation services, we request that we have some sort of control and decision making power to ensure that our hard earned tax dollars are spent wisely and put to good use to actually benefit the families and kids that are paying those taxes. We hereby request that the transportation contract be granted to “Mosdos Hatorah Vhachinuch of Blooming Grove” a not-for-profit transportation company that is local and fully owned by the collective parent body by and for the community. This bus company is fully certified, licensed and equipped to carry out the transportation services without any issue or delay, and it is also in position to remediate and prevent all of the above complaints to the full satisfaction of US the taxpaying parents.

           In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand, the day and year placed opposite my signature.