Lakeland Asks Voters to Spend $1M on New Buses

SHRUB OAK, N.Y. — When residents of the Lakeland Central School District vote on the district budget and for board trustees, they will also see a bond proposition asking them to approve over a million dollars to replace buses.

At the Lakeland Board of Education meeting Thursday, the board unanimously approved a resolution to ask the public for permission to replace 10 percent of Lakeland’s bus fleet, said Raymond Morningstar, assistant superintendent for business. 

Morningstar said the district usually replaces 10 percent of the buses every year and declares older buses as surplus and sells them, but that hasn’t happened for a few years. 

“We decreased the number of buses that we were putting out to the public each of the last two years,” Morningstar said.

The district had been looking into a different plan for middle school transportation and held onto older buses longer than it normally would. Now the district has declared those buses as surplus and is back on track to replace a percentage of the buses. 

Morningstar said the district plans to buy two Suburbans, four 30-passenger vans and seven full-size buses. He said the cost would be $1,035,000.

He said that buying the buses wouldn’t affect the proposed budget for the coming year, as the district won’t pay for the buses in the coming school year, but rather the year after.

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