MK Moshe Gafni (UTJ) has filed a complaint with State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss over the funding provided for school buses in the hareidi-religious sector.  While 20 percent of school-age children attend hareidi-religious schools, he said, the sector receives only 2.3 percent of the national budget for school transportation.

Gafni was also upset after attending a recent Education Committee meeting and discovering that a new procedure determining the exact distance from a student’s house to school had been used only for hareidi-religious students.  The procedure has led to the loss of publicly funded school transportation for many students who had been qualified for transportation under the old system of calculating the distance of a student’s house from school.  The procedure was put into effect in the hareidi-religious community four years ago, but was only put into effect in public schools in 2007.