school boards – Hank Kalet

Hurdles to participation

This move by the Mt. Olive school district, if approved tonight, presages a dangerous trend in public education.

Mount Olive High School students who play sports and some who join clubs will be forced to pay a participation fee next year to make up for budget shortfalls.

The Board of Education must come up with $91,000 in revenue from the fees, and preliminarily announced the fees will be $125 for a student to play an unlimited number of sports and $25 to join nonacademic, nonservice clubs, school board President Mark Werner said at a recent board meeting.

Thus, a student who plays multiple sports and is in multiple clubs would pay $150, the same as a student who plays one sport and is in one club.

“That’s what we’re looking at right now,” Werner said. “However we slice it, we have to come up with $91,000. That’s our mission — $91,000.”

On first blush, this might seem an innovative way to plug a hole in the school district’s budget. And it is difficult to criticize the district for exploring this avenue.

But seeking fees from students raises questions about access to programs, about the openness of participation in public school activities and whether such fees might pose, if not an impediment, then a disincentive to joining clubs or playing sports.

Granted, these activities are extras, but they have become a central part of the high school experience — and they are an important part of the college applicaton process. Colleges not only seek students with solid grades and high test scores, but those who participate in the school culture — in clubs and sports — because they want kids who are well rounded and interested in more than just books.

The fees, therefore, become not only a financial hurdle to high school participation but potentially create a drag on the ability of low- or moderate-income students to get into college.

Thoughts on school board votes: Divining meaning from the random

Before anyone jumps to conclusions about Tuesday’s school election results, they need to consider the history.

Yes, more than 70 percent of school budgets were approved around the state, according to NJ.com. (The percentage was higher locally.) This may seem like a shockingly high percentage. When placed within its historical context, however, it isn’t.

A quick review of school budget results going back to 1976 shows that in 23 of the last 34 years, including this year, more than two-thirds of budget passed statewide (more than 70 percent passed in 19 of those years); in only five years did less than 60 percent pass — including 1976, when 44 percent passed, the only year in which the numbers dipped below 50.

The lean years, for the most part, correspond with public anger over New Jersey taxes — 1990 and 1991 were the Florio backlash years, 2006 was the property tax reform/budget shutdown year, 1994 featured Christie Whitman’s assault on spending and the 1976 votes came just a month after the creation of the first state income tax in response to court rulings on education funding (Robinson v. Cahill).

Given this history, perhaps yesterday’s results were surprising. Republicans, for instance, are trying to cast Jon Corzine in the role of Jim Florio and re-stoke the anger of that earlier era. And voters are angry about a lot of things — at least according to polls that show a majority of New Jerseyans disapproving of the governor’s efforts to date.

And yet, most budget passed — many by comfortable margins.

What does this mean? It is difficult to say. There are two historical trends butting up against each other — one in which a generalized state-level public anger is taken out on school budgets and another in which voters tend to support educational spending.

Remember, Jim Florio lost by less than 25,000 votes to Whitman in 1993 despite being one of the most unpopular governors in the state’s history and Brendan Byrne won a second term in 1977 despite predictions to the contrary. And Robert Menendez, in the 2006 Senate race, was down by double digits in the polls late in the campaign against Tom Kean Jr. — and he won by double digits.

I have no idea where all of this is going. What I do know, however, is that we have a long way to go before voters have to decide (we don’t even have an official Republican challenger yet). And yesterday’s results did little to clarify this.

Doing the math

Let’s do some math.

First, 78 percent of school budgets on the ballot yesterday — including all four in the towns my papers cover — were approved. It was the highest approval figure since 2001.

Then add the results of the Quinnipiac Poll released yesterday:

Sparked by increased approval for his property tax reduction plan, the poll results released today are Corzine’s highest ever, and show “little apparent effect from his auto accident,” according to Quinnipiac.

Here are the numbers:

51 – 36 percent approval among more than 800 registered voters surveyed April 10 – 12, before news of his accident was widely known;
52 – 35 percent approval among almost 500 voters surveyed April 13 – 16, or after the accident;
51 – 36 percent overall approval for the entire survey.

Voters approve 71 – 21 percent of the property tax cut Corzine signed recently. The Governor still gets a negative 41 – 44 percent approval for his handling of property taxes, but this is his highest score on this issue, up from 33 – 57 percent February 28.

The numbers, when added together, would seem to indicate that a tax revolt similar to the 1991 purge that gave the Republicans a majority is not in the offing.

But then, the Legislature remains in the red in the poll. But there is another number that probably needs to be added into the mix: the Democrat’s 4-1 financing advantage.

(Rider University Professor David) Rebovich said safe districting and Democratic Party cash advantages will likely prevent any power shift in the coming election.

“Plus, most residents like their individual lawmakers while disapproving of the institution,” Rebovich said.

So much for an angry electorate.

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Do board members forfeittheir free-speech rights?

Paul Mulshine and I, to put it bluntly, come from different universes.

I’m an unreconstructed leftist, a liberal, a progressive — whatever you want to call it. He’s an old-line New Jersey, small-government, libertarian conservative whose logic I find maddening (I’m sure that, were he reading my columns, he’d say the same about me).

And then he writes a column like the one in today’s paper, which takes the state’s School Ethics Commission to task for clamping down on the free speech rights of school board members.

The column caught my eye because of two complaints filed by Monroe resident Jennifer Dressel against a pair of Monroe school board members alleging, in part, that they misrepresented themselves before the public.

As we’ll be writing in tomorrow’s paper, Ms. Dressel is accusing school board President Kathy Kolupanowich and board member Amy Speizer of speaking “separately at parent group meetings without school board approval, while leaving the impression that they represented the board. The complaint also alleges that Ms. Kolupanowich write a letter that implied she was speaking on behalf of the board without board approval and that Ms. Speizer should have
recused herself from matters dealing the board attorney.”

I don’t want to address the specifics of the complaints. It is the process that concerns me, the way in which the ethics rules can be used to quiet board members — whether they be critical of the board or board members defending board actions against critics.

Mulshine describes a Morris County case recently decided by the commission:

The incident began when Harmon, who is a pharmaceutical executive and lives in Long Valley, cast the sole dissenting vote against the school budget last year. His reasoning was that the budget was up 11 percent over the prior year and that this would lead to an increase in property taxes for the hard-working people of the township.

Voting against a budget isn’t illegal — yet. But then Harmon made the mistake of sending a letter to the editor of the local newspaper explaining why he thought voters should oppose the budget.

“The ethics code is just so squishy,” Harmon told me. “Any bozo with a beef can file a complaint against you.”

The bozo in question was a former school board member named Ruth Lisa McCurdy. She also wouldn’t return my call. I suspect these people think speech itself is illegal. In any event, McCurdy filed a complaint under a provision of the school board ethics code that says a member may not “take any private action that may compro mise the board.” She also disagreed with the budget figures in Harmon’s letter.

The commission dismissed the complaint but left intact an advisory opinion that allow board members to write letters as private citizens but to “not hold (themselves) out as a board member.”

Abbott Koloff, writing in the Morristown Daily Record, calls it a “challenge to democracy.”

The point is that school board members are always school board members. To pretend otherwise is disingenuous and to assume that everything that comes out of their mouths, whether it be an opinion on a controversial high school plan, state legislation or the Mets’ pitching staff.

And, in the case of letters to the editor, school board members have no control over how they are identified — our politcy is to always identify board members as board members.

The intent of the rule may have been good — to prevent board member comments from being mistaken as the opinions of the board — but it is overly broad and makes it more likely that board members will just keep quiet. That’s not good for voters, for public policy or democratcy.

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