E-mail says city no longer provides bus service to 7th and 8th graders because 'times are tough'
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The Department of Education's top budget woman has a message to students who now have to get up extra early, walk for miles over-hazardous roadways and pack into crowded city buses to get to school: Times are tough.
That was the response Kathleen Grimm, Deputy Chancellor for Finance and Administration, gave to a DOE government liaison when asked about why the agency was eliminating a variance to provide yellow bus service for about 3,000 seventh and eighth-graders on Staten Island.
Jenna Nicolosi, an eighth-grader at Totten Intermediate School who used to take the bus in the morning, gets a ride from her parents. City Councilman Vincent Ignizio (R-South Shore) had asked Maura Keaney, DOE's executive director of external affairs, whether eliminating the variance was in violation of a chancellor regulation.
Ms. Grimm responded to Ms. Keaney in a May 12 e-mail: "Reg says 'in a small number of cases where public transit facilities are inadequate or unavailable, exceptions may be granted by the Office of Pupil Transportation to allow the use of existing contract bus service provided for children in elementary grades by pupils in grades 7 and 8.'"
"We are not granting these exceptions any more. We are not obligated to provide. Times are tough."
The e-mail - unveiled during the trial over a lawsuit to restore the buses in state Supreme Court in the former home port in Stapleton yesterday - was another in a series of potentially embarrassing internal correspondences among top DOE exposed in the courtroom. Other e-mails revealed DOE officials consider the yellow buses a political favor to the Island, were unclear whether eliminating them would save any money and that they were not sure they would be able to provide all those students with MetroCards to use public transportation.
Ms. Grimm's e-mail directly contradicts the message in a letter the DOE sent to school principals the very next day, which stated that although it was eliminating a blanket variance for Island seventh and eighth graders, parents could apply for individual variances due to hazardous conditions or lack of public transportation. Normally, the DOE only buses students up to sixth grade.
That inconsistency didn't escape Ms. Grimm's chief of staff, Jeff Shear. In a May 25 e-mail to CEO of School Support Services Eric Goldstein, Shear expressed concern the letter would elicit "troves of requests" for individual variances, which, if granted, would essentially negate the savings of eliminating the blanket variance.
"I don't care what we say in this particular letter," Goldstein responded. "We do not bus seventh and eighth-graders."
DOE has apparently stuck to that policy. According to another internal memo, as of Aug. 6, the agency had reviewed 406 variances for seventh and eighth grade students to receive yellow bus service. Only one was granted.
Other DOE correspondence, read aloud in court, revealed how the DOE planned to explain the bus cuts in a briefing with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his aides. In an e-mail to Ms. Grimm titled "internal talking points," Ms. Keaney suggested she "shy away from exact numbers," and stress that the "whole decision process is fluid without calculating the cost of MetroCards."
Ms. Keaney was referring to an analysis completed by another of Ms. Grimm's aides that suggested providing MetroCards to 3,000 students would cost more than keeping the bus service - especially since the MTA had threatened to revoke free MetroCards at the time.
During his testimony yesterday, Goldstein admitted the chancellor's regulation on bus transportation was "vague," providing them with a loophole large enough to drive a yellow bus through.
"There is no hard definition of inadequate or unavailable transportation," Goldstein said, referring to the exception to the busing rules Ms. Grimm cited in her e-mail.
After three days of trial, state Supreme Court Justice John Fusco appeared to be losing his patience with what he called evasive answers from DOE officials.
"I am getting an awful lot of verbiage, but nothing based on hard evidence, photos, inspections or studies," the animated judge said. "Just words, words, words, day after day after day, from the agency that is supposed to be in charge of getting children to school safely."