Several Two River-area school districts could be targeted for consolidation after a series of new recommendations were delivered last week by New Jersey’s top lawmaker.
Last year New Jersey Senate President Steve Sweeney assembled 26 experts as part of an economic and fiscal policy workgroup that was charged with studying tax and fiscal policy, while identifying methods for New Jersey to combat soaring pension and benefit costs, stabilize property tax levies and, among other tasks, make school districts more efficient.
During a presentation April 16 to members of the New Jersey Business and Industry Association at their headquarters in Trenton, Sweeney said, “You can’t change the system if you don’t fix the system.”
Sweeney then unveiled a list of 32 recommendations, titled a “Path to Progress,” proposed by the workgroup, which includes the merger of all elementary and middle school districts into K-12 regional districts.
“The goal is to eliminate the administration, but keep the principals in the schools and let the regional high school become a K-12 district,” Sweeney said.
In theory, Sweeney’s proposal calls for the elimination of superintendent positions in smaller school districts, placing the oversight of those consolidated elementary and middle school communities under the purview of their regional high school superintendent.
“You’ll probably save close to about a billion dollars,” Sweeney said, noting the annual total cost savings to tax payers.
If this recommendation is adopted, it could cause a complicated situation in Colts Neck, among other local regional school districts.
Colts Neck Township High School is part of the Freehold Regional School District (FRSD), alongside Freehold Boro, Freehold Township, Howell, Manalapan and Marlboro high schools.
The township’s lower level schools – Conover Road Primary, Conover Road Elementary and Cedar Drive Middle Schools – are currently governed by their own superintendent as part of the Colts Neck Township School District.
Under the proposal, these three lower level schools would fall under the umbrella of the FRSD, which would also have to account for lower level schools in the five other districts, which could lead to costly contract negotiations as the salaries and health benefits of faculty and staff are equalized. The Colts Neck superintendent could not be reached for comment.
“Hypothetically, the financial impact would far exceed the total savings for reducing the superintendents,” said Carolyn M. Kossack, Little Silver public schools superintendent. “You’re talking about negotiating more than one common contract across several municipalities. That’s a big task.”
Kossack’s Little Silver schools, together with those in Red Bank and Shrewsbury, would fall under the direction of the Red Bank Regional High School District.
Once these schools merge, Kossack said teachers at the highest end of the wage scale would be unlikely to accept salary cuts to level the compensation among new colleagues at consolidated schools.
“Instead, salaries and benefits would have to be negotiated up,” Kossack said. “And you’d see the same trickle-up effect with administrative staff, too.”
Before winning a mayoral election in 2015 as a write-in candidate, Jay Coffey was a member of the Oceanport Board of Education, another school district selected for consolidation.
He also serves as the corporation counsel for the City of Bayonne, a municipality considered to have a large school district, like Middletown and Holmdel townships.
Studying Sweeney’s merger recommendation from both perspectives, Coffey said it’s a circumstance of “different strokes for different folks.”
“It’s dangerous to apply a broad scope plan to really narrowly scoped issues, and I don’t think there’s a panacea that can be applied across the state,” Coffey said. “Whether consolidation is good or bad is completely dependent on the situation. What may be good for one town or county may not be good for another. The financial layers of muscle will be different in a big school system versus a smaller one.”
Coffey added that in smaller school districts like Oceanport, which would be managed by the Shore Regional High School District with schools from Monmouth Beach and West Long Branch, the notion of cost savings versus value added should be factored into the equation.
“You can quantify the exact cost savings of eliminating ‘x’ number of superintendents. But there’s a value to each of those towns having their own superintendent that is not as easily calculable,” Coffey said. “It’s like the last photo I have of my mother and I. The photo itself is worth about 7 cents. But to me, I can’t put a personal value on it.”
Kossack said part of the job description in a smaller district is a hands-on approach to educational management and leadership, including regular in-class observations of faculty and meetings with staff members to gain a better understanding of issues that are important to their school communities.
Over the last three years Kossack has filed letters to the state and spoken with legislators from New Jersey’s 11th and 13th congressional districts advocating for additional funding for special needs students in Little Silver and around the Two River peninsula.
With superintendents so involved in the day-to-day lives of their faculty and students, Kossack wonders if similar concerns will fall through the cracks should this consolidation measure be adopted.
“For lack of a better expression, that sense of intimacy creates a stronger communal climate. When a superintendent walks the halls and knows the teachers and staff and can connect with them about life, it creates more understanding,” Kossack said. “When you get to a point of regionalizing and becoming so large, you risk losing that intimacy.”
