New school referendum date may be postponed

September of 2003 to be considered

By:Eve Collins
   CHESTERFIELD — The Chesterfield Township Board of Education will vote next week on whether to postpone the March referendum seeking voter approval for the construction of an $18.7 million elementary school.
   Officials said they are considering postponing the referendum because they will not find out until April whether additional funding is available from the state.
   The school board will vote Tuesday on whether to change the date of the March 11 referendum, possibly to September, said Chief School Administrator Edward Gibson.
   Members of the school board met with the Township Committee on Jan. 9 and Jan. 14 to share information and collaborate on how to acquire funds for the new school and to discuss the impact on taxpayers.
   The committee voted in December to seek funds from the state Department of Environmental Protection’s Green Acres program for funding 23 acres at the site where the school will be built.
   The site will include athletic fields that would be usable by the district during the school day and by the township at-large if funded through Green Acres, said Dr. Gibson.
   The township should know how much it will get from Green Acres in April. The committee asked for 23 acres in its application before it knew that 27.4 acres were needed for the school, Dr. Gibson said.
   The approximate cost of the school submitted by the district to the state Department of Education is $18.7 million. The project already has received a commitment of $3.5 million from the state Department of Education Division of Facilities and Transportation if the referendum is passed, bringing the cost down to $15.1 million, Dr. Gibson said.
   Of the total cost, $1.3 million is for renovations to the existing school, he said.
   District officials presented the plans for a new elementary school to the Township Committee on Nov. 14. The school will be needed within the next five years because of a planned village center in the township that may include 1,270 homes by 2012, based on developers’ projections gathered by Township Planner Phillip Caton, said Dr. Gibson.
   The township’s current school has 271 students, said Dr. Gibson. By the time the new homes are built, there could be hundreds more, he said. The school only has room for 30 to 40 more students.
   If the referendum is passed March 11, the school could open in 2005. If the referendum date is changed, the school, if approved, would open in 2006 or later and the district will have a lot of extra students, Dr. Gibson said.
   In order to deal with the extra students, Dr. Gibson said, class sizes would have to increase and some existing programs would have to be eliminated to make room for the pupils. Also, the district might have to acquire mobile classrooms, which are expensive, he said.
   The district would receive no help from the state for the mobile classrooms, he said.
   The new school would be located on 27.4 acres in the middle of the planned village district. Of that land, 9 acres will be for the school, 9 acres will be for fields used for recreation and the other 9 acres are wetlands (which cannot be used), said Dr. Gibson.