Fast-track for charter school riles H.P. residents

The email circulated by Highland Park school board president Wendy Saiff was urgent, if not frantic, in tone. The email announced a petition, on a fast track for state approval, to found a language and culture charter school in Highland Park.

She urged attendance at an emergency meeting on November 23: “If you have children in our schools, if you own a home in this town, if you enjoy the quality of life in this town – this issue is important to you!”

“Funding for charter schools comes directly out of the local school budget,” Saiff wrote in her email. "[The] already austere budget will be even more depleted and the educational opportunities we have all come to expect from our schools will be a thing of the past.”

As 25 women and men gathered at the H.P. Middle School cafeteria, Saiff joked, “To have so many people show up on such short notice, two days before Thanksgiving… well, that’s why I love Highland Park.” This remark, at the start of the meeting, was perhaps the only lighthearted moment in the impassioned discussion that followed.

Saiff began with an explanation of the events that preceded the meeting: the board of education was approached by a group of residents requesting that Hebrew language instruction be offered in the Highland Park Schools. According to Saiff, the school board was willing to accommodate this request, in part because they anticipated and wanted to avert a possible charter school application as had happened recently in East Brunswick. But after some research, she reported, they were unable to find a Hebrew language instructor who met state certification requirements.

In the meantime, Saiff reported, the Board was asked to consider supplying kosher meals in the school lunch program, and to provide a private, quiet space for students. These requests were rejected, with the school board deciding that public education money could not be used for such purposes. Shortly thereafter, the board was notified that an application for a Hebrew Language Charter School had been submitted to Trenton.

Saiff reported that the Board of Education has already received a notice from Trenton requiring them to reserve $120,000 for the charter. This money, says Saiff, represents a significant portion of a budget already depleted by cuts in state aid and facing further pressure from Governor Christie's proposed 2% annual cap on levy increases.

The flurry of questions and comments ranged from disbelief to outrage: How is it possible that we haven’t heard about this? Don’t the town’s residents have a say? What happened to separation of Church and State? Isn’t this a significant amount of public money to fund a small population of the community?

Participants were directed to the website of a self-described nonpartisan policy organization, “Save Our Schools New Jersey.” At the SOSnj website, the answers for many of the meeting’s attendants were frustratingly simple: “The existing charter law gives local communities no control over the opening of new charter schools in their districts, even though [the funds] come out of the host district’s schools budget.”

SOSnj’s position continued, “Charter schools educate very few English-As-Second-Language students, very poor students, or students with special needs. . . [Districts] with charter schools are left with fewer resources to educate a more expensive population of students.”

One resident, a proponent of the Highland Park and East Brunswick charter schools, found it difficult to get her points heard at Tuesday’s meeting. “Your enemy is not the charter school,” she told the crowd. “The problem is funding.... Highland Park has to read the writing on the walls. You cannot shut down the charter school movement.”

The location for the Hebrew Language Charter School is still in question, according to Saiff. The application says it will be located in the H.P. Conservative Temple and Center on South Third Avenue, but Saiff reported that the CTC declined the use of that building.

As the meeting adjourned, Saiff urged her audience to contact legislators to demand more local control, accountability, and transparency in the charter school process. “There are statewide implications,” she said. At the beginning of the 2010 school year, in one example, East Brunswick sued to prevent another language and culture charter from opening, and lost.

The last word went to one vocally disgruntled resident who opined, "Using public funds to support segregation sets us back, not forward."