Drivers Protest Holiday Work at Jewish Schools
Some school bus drivers in Lakewood, N.J., are expressing their displeasure with having to work on Thanksgiving driving Orthodox Jewish students to school.
About 200 bus drivers will work on the holiday – half the number of a regular school day – taking some 18,000 Orthodox students to private Jewish schools in Lakewood, according to the Asbury Park Press. The state requires the school system to provide transportation Monday through Friday from September to June.
Bus driver Kofo Ademosu, 23, told the Asbury Park Press that in addition to getting up at 5 a.m. for work, she will have to cook her Thanksgiving dinner.
Ademosu said that “we [bus drivers] are being treated like worse than servants. There’s really no amount of money that would make it OK [to work Thanksgiving].”
In the past, parents carpooled to school on Thanksgiving, but the number of students has grown too large for that to be practical, school officials told the newspaper.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism so that we can be prepared for whatever news 2025 brings.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
