NJ Voters Support Allowing More Choices for School Transportation

NJ Voters Support Allowing More Choices for School Transportation

No Gap Between Republicans and Democrats on the Issue

Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, NJ, June 16, 2026 – School transportation options in New Jersey are limited compared to other states, but voters support changes that would bring the Garden State in line with best practices nationally. The latest results from the FDU Poll, in partnership with New Jersey Friends of Affordable Safe Student Transportation (NJ FASST), show voters, by a wide margin, favor opening up the school transportation system to allow schools to contract more widely for transportation services for homeless or disabled children.

“There’s not really a great case to be made for limiting the options school districts have in transporting students,” said Dan Cassino, a Professor of Government and Politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University, and the Executive Director of the FDU Poll. “Some kids have special needs, and voters are ok with giving schools flexibility to address their needs.” 

Under current law in New Jersey, all school transportation has to be carried out by school bus drivers employed by bus companies or districts, approved school personnel, or parents. This puts the state at odds with most others, where alternative transportation services are commonly used to transport children with disabilities that might make traditional yellow school buses difficult, and homeless children, who may need to be picked up from different addresses during a school year. Currently in New Jersey, Bus and van drivers used for these purposes need to have a Commercial Driver’s License and undergo background checks and monitoring.

Because alternative student transportation primarily serves students with individualized needs, rules in other states have provisions focusing on single-pupil transportation, rather than large groups of students: smaller personal vehicles designed including minivans, sedans, and SUVs that carry eight passengers or fewer. In states that permit alternative student transportation, drivers still must undergo rigorous background checks, continuous vehicle monitoring, and comply with other safeguards. But, unlike New Jersey, drivers do not need to have a Commercial Driver’s License since they are not operating the larger vehicles (like buses and semi-trucks) for which such licenses were principally designed.

A new group of advocates hopes to pave a road to similar modern transportation options for New Jersey’s students. The New Jersey Friends of Affordable Safe Student Transportation (NJ FASST) coalition includes parents, educators, nonprofits, small businesses, and taxpayers seeking a legislative fix to allow alternative student transportation. Its members include the New Jersey Association of Special Education Partner Schools, Great Schools of New Jersey, the New Jersey Business and Industry Association, and more. All have united around a common goal of ensuring that students from Wantage to Watchung to West Cape May have the option of transportation tailored to better serve students with more individualized needs.

“New Jersey’s students and families deserve transportation options that are safe, reliable, affordable, and adaptable to the realities of today’s school day and workforce schedules which is clearly supported by a majority of New Jersey residents as this poll proves. It is vital to advance innovative, practical solutions that improve student access to education while easing burdens on families, school districts, and taxpayers,” said Ocean Twp. Mayor John P. Napolitani, Sr.

Advocates say that the policy also helps to address the unsustainable costs of New Jersey’s current approach for school districts and taxpayers. At a time where school districts are cutting programs and laying off teachers and staff, student transportation is often one of the largest line items in a school district’s budget. Deploying a full-size school bus with a CDL-holding driver for a single student on a specialized route costs significantly more than necessary. According to NJ FASST, forty-one states have already passed laws that increase flexibility for school districts while at the same time providing for more affordable and safer transportation options.

Overall, 63 percent of voters in New Jersey support the proposal to allow private drivers to transport homeless and disabled students to school, with 33 percent opposed. Support is about equal among Republicans (61 percent) and Democrats (65 percent), though conservative (59 percent) and MAGA voters (49 percent) are less likely to be in favor.

“In New Jersey, education is the one thing that Republicans and Democrats can always agree on,” said Cassino. “There’s no partisan way to get kids to school.”

The biggest gap in attitudes on the proposal is based on the age of the respondent. Younger voters – those 30 and under- are the most supportive (77 percent), while the oldest cohort (65 and over) is the least (51 percent).

Methodology

The FDU Poll is a proud member of the AAPOR Transparency Initiative and is devoted to ensuring that our results are presented in such a way that anyone can quickly and easily get all of the information that they may need to evaluate the validity of our surveys. We believe that transparency is the key to building trust in the work of high-quality public opinion research, and necessary to push our industry forward.

The survey was conducted between March 20 and 28, 2026, using a voter list of registered voters in New Jersey carried out by Braun Research of Princeton, New Jersey. Respondents were contacted via either live caller telephone interviews, or text-to-web surveys sent to cellular phones, resulting in an overall sample of 805 registered voters in the state. Surveys were carried out via live caller telephone interviews to landlines (127) and cellphones (275) and the remainder (404) were done on a web platform via weblinks sent via SMS to cell phones. Surveys were conducted only in English.

The data were weighted to be representative of the population of registered voters in New Jersey. The weights used, like all weights, balance the demographic characteristics of the sample to match known population parameters. The weighted results used here are balanced to match parameters for sex, age, education, region and race/ethnicity.

SPSSINC RAKE, an SPSS extension module that simultaneously balances the distributions of all variables using the GENLOG procedure, was used to produce final weights. Weights were trimmed to prevent individual interviews from having too much influence on the final results. The use of these weights in statistical analysis helps to ensure that the demographic characteristics of the sample approximate the demographic characteristics of the target population. The size of these weights is used to construct the measure of design effects, which indicate the extent to which the reported results are being driven by the weights applied to the data, rather than found in the data itself. Simply put, these design effects tell us how many additional respondents would have been needed to get the weighted number of respondents across weighted categories: larger design effects indicate greater levels of under-representation in the data. In this case, calculated design effects are approximately 1.2, largely driven by the weights used on the race/ethnicity variable.

All surveys are subject to sampling error, which is the expected probable difference between interviewing everyone in a population versus a scientific sampling drawn from that population. Sampling error should be adjusted to recognize the effect of weighting the data to better match the population. In this poll, the simple sampling error for 805 registered voters is +/-3.4 percentage points, at a 95 percent confidence interval. Including the design effects, the margin of error would be +/-3.9 percentage points, though the figure not including them is much more commonly reported.

This error calculation does not take into account other sources of variation inherent in public opinion studies, such as non-response, question wording, differences in translated forms, or context effects. While such errors are known to exist, they are often unquantifiable within a particular survey, and all efforts, such as randomization and extensive pre-testing of items, have been used to minimize them.

Weighted Telephone Sample Characteristics                                          

805 Registered Voters in New Jersey

Figures do not include individuals who declined to answer demographic items.

Man                                

47%                 N = 376
Woman                            

52%                 N = 417
Some Other Way          

1%                  N = 5

18-30                          

15%                N = 119
31-44                          

22%                 N = 175
45-64                          

33%                 N = 266
65+                              

30%                 N = 243

White                                           

65%                N = 523
Black                                              

14%                N = 113
Hispanic/Latino/a                                     

12%                N = 97
Asian                                       

4%                  N = 32
MENA                                      

1%                  N = 10
Other/Multi-racial                                    

2%                  N = 18

No college degree                      

57%                N = 459
College degree or more             

42%                N = 337

Democrat (including leaners)    

48%                N = 355
Independent (no lean)                

15%                N = 113
Republican (including leaners)  

37%                N = 271

Question Wording and Order

First off, we’d like to ask you a few questions about government here in New Jersey.

NJ1. Do you approve or disapprove of the way Mikie Sherrill is handling her job as governor?

1. Approve
2. Disapprove
3. Not Sure/Don’t Know [Vol]
4. Refused [Vol]

NJ2. Already, the governor has come into conflict with President Trump. When there is a conflict, what do you think the governor should do? Should she try and work with President Trump, or should she use lawsuits and other means to defy him?

1. Work with him
2. Defy him
3. It depends or similar [Vol]
4. Don’t Know
5. Refused

B1. In order to balance the budget, the state of New Jersey is going to have to either cut spending, increase taxes, or both. I’m going to list some proposals that could cut spending or increase revenue for the state. Which of the following proposals to help balance the budget would you support? You can say “yes” to as many as you like.

1. Not make a full payment to teacher’s pension plans
2. Reduce support for public colleges and universities
3. Reduce the property tax rebates received by seniors in the state
4. Reduce state support for local schools
5. Cut state funding for the Rutgers football team
6. Reduce funding for NJ Transit
7. Charge a fee to businesses who have employees that get healthcare from the state

1. Support/Yes
2. Oppose/No
3. Don’t Know
4. Refused

There are also a number of other important issues facing the state.

NJ3. Right now, casino gambling in New Jersey is limited to Atlantic City. Do you favor or oppose [rotate] expanding casino gambling to other areas in the state?

1. Favor
2. Oppose
3. [DK /REF]

E1. In recent years, New Jersey has generated less electrical power than it uses, meaning that New Jersey power companies have to buy power generated in other states. At the same time, new data centers, many used for what are sometimes called Artificial Intelligence systems, are coming online. These data centers are thought to be vital to the future economic growth of the state. That combination of lower supply and higher demand has meant higher electricity bills for people in New Jersey. What, if anything, do you think we should do about it? You can say yes or no to as many options as you like.

[Yes/No/ Don’t Know for each]

1. Ban the construction of new data centers, until more power plants can be built?
2. Build new natural gas power plants, which can come online faster than other types of power?
3. Build more nuclear power plants, which give reliable power, but may take years to come online?
4. Build more renewable power plants, like wind and solar farms, which provide clean energy, but will take years to come online?

1. Support/Yes
2. Oppose/No
3. Don’t Know
4. Refused

NJ4. Most states allow school districts to arrange for the transportation of homeless and disabled students by private drivers in smaller vehicles instead of typical school buses. Currently, New Jersey law prevents school districts from using these alternative transportation services. Some people think that yellow school buses driven by drivers with commercial driver’s licenses are the safest, most reliable option for getting homeless students and those with disabilities to school. Others say that a more efficient option is vetted private drivers using personal vehicles. What do you think? Should schools in New Jersey be allowed to use alternative transportation companies for homeless or disabled students, or not?

1. Change Laws to allow alternative transportation
2. Don’t Change Laws
3. Don’t Know
4. Refused

NJ6. Outside of the US, many people make use of solar panels made for balconies that sell for a few hundred dollars, plug directly into a wall socket in your house, and don’t need to be installed by an electrician. These panels typically aren’t enough to power a home, but can cut electricity bills. Would you favor or oppose a law that would allow people in New Jersey to use these panels to generate electricity?

1. Favor changing the law to allow people to use these panels
2. Oppose changing the law to allow these panels
3. Don’t Know
4. Refused

Release Tables

Media Contact:                           

Dan Cassino 

Executive Director, FDU Poll    

973.896.7072/ dcassino@fdu.edu