Mark Rosman
Marlboro officials keep cost
of quitting FRHSD hush hush
In the news
Mark Rosman
Apparently, the Marlboro Township Council doesn’t want to tell residents how much it might cost them to pull out of the six-school Freehold Regional High School District.
What other explanation can there be for the fact that the council paid a consultant $3,900 in April to answer that question and now won’t say what he reported?
This "let’s pull out of the FRHSD" idea was part of the Marlboro Advisory Com-mittee on Education that was set up to look into matters surrounding the FRHSD’s plan to assign some high school-age residents who live in Marlboro to attend Colts Neck High School instead of Marlboro High School.
The thinking behind the idea of pulling out of the FRHSD is that if Marlboro is not part of a regional district, then every high school-age student who lives in town can be assigned to Marlboro’s own high school and no students will have to involuntarily attend an out-of-town high school.
At the time the redistricting plan was being discussed, some residents pushed for a consultant to be hired to develop a report showing how much it would cost Marlboro to sever its relationship with the FRHSD, of which it has been a member for more than 50 years.
Consultant Vincent Yaniro completed his report some time ago. Doesn’t it follow that residents should be told what he found?
Apparently not.
Under New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act, the News Transcript asked to see Yaniro’s report. We received a letter back from an attorney who represents Marlboro informing us that Yaniro’s report is "attorney work product" related to ongoing litigation between Marlboro and the FRHSD.
Well, if the attorney wanted the work done as part of his legal preparation, how come he didn’t pay for it? How come Marlboro taxpayers paid Yaniro?
That doesn’t sound like attorney work product to me; it sounds like council work product and it should be public.
The only reason I can think of for why elected officials would want to bury this report and pretend it never existed is because it confirms what everyone in Marl-boro should have known before the council spent $3,900 to have it prepared: That the cost to Marlboro residents to pull out of the FRHSD would run into the millions of dollars and can never be accomplished.
Marlboro owns no high school, employs no high school teachers, has no high school textbooks or high school equipment, etc. Everything at Marlboro High School belongs to the FRHSD. In a time of escalating property taxes, where, exactly, were Marlboro residents — most of whom could care less about the redistricting anyway — going to come up with the cash to pay for Marlboro to get out of the regional district?
To anyone who led residents on by getting them to believe Marlboro can ever pull out of the district, Yaniro’s report, I believe, would be compelling evidence that such a plan can never happen.
My instinct tells me that there may be some officials in town who would be willing to release Yaniro’s report and prove to the public once and for all that remaining in the FRHSD is the best course of action for Marlboro to follow.
Marlboro lost its litigation against the FRHSD last week and the redistricting plan is proceeding on pace for September. At this point, I don’t see how an attorney can continue to claim that Yaniro’s report should now be kept from the public under the lame "it may relate to litigation" explanation.
I would respectfully ask Marlboro’s elected officials to show residents what they (the public) paid for and to ask the attorney to rethink his denial of our request for a copy of the consultant’s report.
Mark Rosman is the managing editor of the News Transcript.