Brick busing 240 students displaced from Sandy

Hurricane Sandy created a lot of turmoil since the end of October with wrecked homes, but Brick has been trying to help 240 children displaced by the storm by transporting them back to their schools, Superintendent Walter Uszenski said on Friday.

"The Board (of Education) and I thought it was extremely important to get some normalcy back to these children's lives," Uszenski said. "We were pretty much in unanimous agreement. It was too important to the kids.

"This is where their friends are. This is where they are educated. This is where they play sports," Uszenski said.

The school has been transporting them at a "minimal" cost, since the school district owns its buses and has only fuel and time to cover, Uszenski said.  This is where friends are friends displaced within reason.

Uszenski, who praised how the staff, students and parent-teacher organizations have responded to Hurricane Sandy, said the district has been keeping very strict documentation about transporting students, since costs may be recovered from the Federal Emergency Management Administration.

The transportation has been limited to neighboring towns, he said. "We can't go to Bayonne, because school would be done by the time we got them here," Uszenski said.