CRANBURY: District changes its school bus vendors

[Guest]

David Kilby, Managing Editor

CRANBURY — After listening to many complaints and noticing many dangers regarding the district’s bus service, the Cranbury Board of Education has decided to change vendors.

At the board meeting Tuesday, the board approved a contract with George Dapper Inc. to provide school transportation for the 2011-12 school year.

The contract covers nine routes per school day for a total of $307,129.63 per year or $1,973.08 per school day.

For field trip transportation, the board approved a contract with Irvin Raphael Inc. for $295 per bus and $3 per mile.
George Dapper Inc. and Irvin Raphael Inc., came in lowest among six bidders for each respective contract.

George Dapper Inc., provided bus services to the district two years ago.

http://www.centraljersey.com/articles/2011/08/19/cranbury_press/news/doc4e4d7fcad7ca3674754937.txt

[Guest]

Dapper Sucks

[Guest]

[Cozy]

[Guest]

They were the bus company the district had a few years ago that everyone hated

[Guest]

Not the previous poster but happy to cite specifics. How about bus drivers that got lost, even on our Township routes. Who got into accidents with kids on buses. Who were late a majority of the time, at least on our route, to the point that our kids were cited for lateness getting to class even through they hustled straight from the bus to class. And who sometimes just never showed up at all and parents had to scrambled to form car pools to get their kids to school.

[Guest]

Horrible service

[publius]

Read the fine print!
LOWEST BIDDER
That usually equals CHEAP.

[Guest]

I am not happy that dapper has received the contract. Two years ago , bus never arrived for first day of school. The kids had at least 3 drivers in the first two weeks. The bus never arrived at the right time. Horrible service! I am dreading the coming year with dapper providing service.

[Guest]

This is the problem with having to award to low bid contracts.

[Guest]

With the old bus service we now have back my kids were late to school a majority of the time despite us having to be out at the stop 42 minutes before the start of school. Now, one day in so far, the same is true. This is really unfair to the kids. It stresses them out, stigmatizes them and sometimes even gets them in trouble with the school. Some of the kids and teachers give them grief for always being late, the school sometimes marks them as tardy and sent us a warning letter about it despite 100% of the time being when the bus delivered them. And my middle schooler doesn’t gets to go to his locker and literally runs to his class from the bus, which is a bad start to the day when you’re lugging a ton of books in your backpack and an instrument.

If they need to pick them up even earlier to get there on time, so be it, but they should not accept a policy that by design will disadvantage some students on a regular basis. Or they should adjust the start of school to allow for the bus kids to arrive on time. It’s up to the school to decide on an equitable solution, but just accepting that certain kids will always be late is not one.

I keep reading about how their hands were tied with the lowest bidder but I don’t buy that. I have done a lot of RFP’s including for public agencies and it’s all about how you structure your bid request. They can set the start of route schedule and build in some time. They could have included penalties for lateness in the contract to incentivize the winning bidder to factor in the necessary time into their bid. Perhaps they could have required offering work at the same rate to veteran drivers on the route as part of the bid package. Our driver last year was actually a Cranbury resident and it was the one year our service was consistently good. Now she’s out of work and we’re left with drivers that won’t even make eye contact or require a friendly hello when parents or kids greet them, and who works for a company whose previous drivers sometimes never showed up at all leaving the parents rushing to form ad hoc car pools.

[Guest]

The old drivers are gone Dapper didn't extend offers to them.

[Guest]

The bus never showed up today at all. That's two days for two it failed to deliver kids before school started.

[Guest]

[Guest]

Is there any recourse built into the bus contract - for example, penalty for these types of problems?

[Guest]