Charter school pulls plug on Sept. opening
173 registered students now must make other arrangements for fall
By sherry conohan
Staff Writer
The Jersey Shore Charter School won’t be opening this fall as its founders had hoped.
Faced with time running out to get everything in place by September, the school’s Board of Trustees on Monday night voted to take a planning year and open in fall 2004 instead.
The charter school had received 173 registrations for this September’s opening, close to the 180 students approved by state Commissioner of Education William L. Librera for the initial enrollment.
The school has a four-year projection of serving 240 students. It plans to begin with grades five, six and seven and then add an eighth grade in its second year of operation.
The school’s charter calls for it to serve Oceanport, Eatontown and West Long Branch, but it had also been appealing to other nearby municipalities to fill its opening-year classes.
Susie Raszkiewicz, who had enrolled her son Evan, who will be in the fifth grade this fall, told the members of the board she was disappointed in its action and took it as a lack of confidence in their ability to make the school run.
"I wish you had fought to the end," she said. "There were 170-something students counting on this. I don’t see why you didn’t fight until the last minute."
The board’s vote to delay the opening by a year was 3-2, with Gary Bradley, Rich Chirumbolo and Joseph Lyons voting to wait and Cindy Berkowitz and Kathleen Devine voting against that motion.
Ellen Pressman, one of two consultants from Chatham Educational Associates, Chatham, who have been advising the charter school on how to start up, said the school does not have to make any new application to the state Department of Education to open next year.
"The state will approve a planning year," she said. "There won’t be a problem with that."
Bradley, who was replaced by Berkowitz as president of the board at the outset of the meeting, said afterward, "Now we have an opportunity to sit back and plan more accurately and obtain a more suitable facility. I’m looking forward to a slower pace."
Librera approved the charter school in January, after a three-year struggle to win Department of Education endorsement.
"We’re certainly not pleased at having to do this," Bradley added. "We’re certainly letting a lot of people down."
Asked where she and the school will go from here, Berkowitz replied, "I don’t know. I’ll have to punt."
Berkowitz said she had not made any decision for herself and wasn’t sure if she would continue to participate in directing the charter school.
"I wanted to move ahead," she said. "I hadn’t thought about what I would do if we took a planning year."
The first victim in the fallout over the delay is Tony Tirrell, a resident of Freehold, who quit his job as assistant principal of Freehold Township High School to become the director of the new charter school.
The charter school board had voted at an emergency meeting the previous Thursday to offer him a contract as director. The board rescinded the contract offer on Monday night after the vote to delay the school’s opening by a year. Joseph Lyons, the vice president of the board, who had helped negotiate the contract with Tirrell, told the board Monday that Tirrell had not signed the contract and he had recommended he not do so until a lease for the school was in place.
Tirrell, who attended Monday’s meeting, said afterward, "I’m looking for a job."
After the vote to wait a year, the board also agreed to send out letters informing the families of all 173 enrollees of the delay in opening, and to e-mail the approximately half of them who are online.
The board had decided at the previous Thursday meeting that it had to come to a quick conclusion on whether to open this fall or not so that parents could make alternate arrangements for their children if the charter school wasn’t to open. It was pointed out that deadlines for re-registration of children attending private schools were rapidly approaching.
It was decided at Thursday’s meeting not to proceed to locate the school over the Redheads bar and restaurant on Hope Road in Eatontown because the landlord would not agree to a lease provision required by the state Department of Education that would nullify the lease and exempt the charter school from paying rent if it was unable to open in the fall as scheduled.
The board then turned to the other site it was considering, at 2 Meridian Road, off Industrial Way in Eatontown. The problem there was the landlord wouldn’t let the children leave the building during the day, but in the interest of getting the school up and running by this fall, the board agreed to proceed with negotiations on a lease for up to four years.
Bradley, at that time, recommended taking a planning year, saying, "Not being able to go outside is major." But the board held off, hoping to negotiate with the landlord on Meridian Road to let the children leave the building in the future after a lease was concluded.
When the board reconvened on Monday, Bradley moved to take a planning year, citing a shortage of time before September:
• to get approval from the state Department of Education for handicap access for the second floor of the Meridian site
• to bid the needed renovations for the building, including construction of bathrooms, since the estimated $50,000 cost well exceeds the $17,500 ceiling for exemption from public bidding
• to get an architect in place to draw up the plans
• to get a building permit to do the work,
• to complete construction and obtain a certificate of occupancy by Aug. 15
• and to get all the office paperwork that’s required completed for the state Department of Education.
There also was curriculum to be developed, teachers to be hired, criminal checks to be made, and a pension plan to be set up.
"I don’t believe we have the time to get it done," Bradley said.
He also cautioned against taking the next step to trigger a loan to support the charter school as it revved up for the opening and then possibly not having the income to make payments on it.
The board decided at 8 p.m. to go into executive session to discuss all of the above, on a 3-1 vote with one abstention. Berkowitz, Lyons and Kathleen Devine voted to move behind closed doors while Bradley voted against the executive session. Chirumbolo abstained.
At 8:45 p.m., the board emerged from its executive session and voted to delay opening by a year.
It also voted 4-0 with one abstention by Berkowitz to apply for the second half of a federal loan to help charter schools get up and running. The Jersey Shore Charter School received the first half of the grant, $150,000, earlier this year and is now applying for the second half of $150,000, the board explained.
It further voted to ask Tirrell to perform various administrative duties during the summer associated with the hoped-for startup next year, as money becomes available with the grant.
That was passed 3-0 with two abstentions by Berkowitz and Devine.
The board also voted to spend up to $9,000 from the grant for an accounting software program.
Bradley said the charter school also will proceed with the purchase of $117,000 in laptop computers. He said other expenses include $10,000 spent on public relations and marketing, including the printing of brochures for distribution to parents of potential enrollees in the school.
The other change of officers included the election of Lyons, previously the treasurer, as vice president, and of Devine as treasurer. No secretary was elected to replace Chirumbolo.