What news is fit to print?

The Brick Township school district is now part of an elite group of only 28 districts throughout the state to receive funds from the state Department of Education to bring more special needs children into general education classrooms.

And the district was only one of five to receive the maximum grant of $500,000. School officials should be congratulated on bringing that amount of money into the district. And school officials like Schools Superintendent Thomas L. Seidenberger had no problem trumpeting the good news over the past several weeks.

But that wasn't all that happened recently.

The bad news about the district's school bus system is now almost two months old. It came in the form of a devastating audit by a third-party firm that found glaring deficiencies in just about every transportation department operation.

But Seidenberger and other school officials here decided not to release the review conducted by Transportation Advisory Systems, a Walworth, N.Y.-based firm, until they could provide an "action plan" to go with it. To withhold such critical information from the public was a big blunder.

That's because Brick taxpayers and especially Brick parents whose children ride buses to school every day deserved to know at the outset just how bad things were in the district's transportation system. Their money paid for the audit.

The TAS audit was dated March 24. It wasn't until the Bulletin was able to review portions of the report recently that the problems were made public.

Seidenberger said last week it was "very irresponsible" that someone had provided the information to the Bulletin. He's got it all wrong. It was very irresponsible that district officials didn't let the public know what the massive problems were and just how they intended to fix the mess.

The superintendent says he didn't want to "panic" department employees and have them fear for their jobs. But the focus should not be on panicked employees. It should be on how the department was allowed to deteriorate to the point it did.

The audit detailed problems with financial oversight, improper use of assets, unauthorized bus stops, drivers paid full-time wages for less than full-time hours, an understaffed bus maintenance department, buses that failed inspection way too often and an improperly ventilated maintenance garage. There were no internal audit functions for payroll, purchasing, paycheck dispersal and attendance.

It will take months, if not years, to straighten out the mess in the transportation department, along with a massive infusion of money

TAS didn't have an "action plan" for the district. TAS flat out recommended that some or all bus services be privatized, because, the report said, it was unlikely the district would be able to fix it.

Parents had more than an inkling that things were amiss in the bus department last September, when school opened. They flooded the transportation office with complaints about the lack of steady drivers, an unresponsive transportation department and buses that arrived late to school.

District officials must have had a heads-up about how bad things were in the audit in February, when they announced that transportation department Supervisor William Nardiello had "agreed" be transferred to the maintenance department, effective July 1.

They hired Township Council Joseph Sangiovanni to take over the troubled department on May 1, at an annual salary of $85,000. But incredibly, Nardiello is being kept on in the transportation department during Sangiovanni's "transition" period.

Someone needs to be held accountable for the sorry state of the transportation department. It didn't happen overnight, or in the course of one year. And it's inexcusable that the information was withheld from the public for so long.