President says legislation would erode local control
By: Stephanie Brown
Local elected and appointed school officials are wary about proposed legislation to create an executive county superintendent.
They say aspects of the proposal could be beneficial, but some officials were critical of the new executive superintendent’s authority and questioned the legislation’s cost-effectiveness overall.
Several bills are under review by the Joint Legislative Committee on Consolidation and Shared Services including Bill A54, sponsored by Assembly Speaker Joseph Roberts (D-Camden), which would replace the county superintendent of schools with an executive county superintendent appointed by the governor.
The new position would take over the duties now assigned to the county superintendent, while also having broader executive authority over local districts. For example, the executive county superintendent could recommend consolidation of districts’ administrative services; recommend eliminating state education mandates deemed "unnecessary"; have the final say on hiring district superintendents, assistant superintendents and school business administrators; and review and approve all school districts’ budgets. In addition, the executive superintendent would be required to develop a plan to consolidate school districts in the county, which would then be sent to the affected districts for a referendum.
Jamesburg Superintendent Shirley Bzdewka said she was troubled by the approach. In the Legislature’s efforts to reduce property taxes, Ms. Bzdewka said the school system is being wrongly treated as a business.
"The problem we’re always running up against is that the state guidelines always come down to dollars and cents, streamlining and making the system more efficient," she said. "But you’re not dealing with a business. You’re dealing with human beings, with children. Yes, we run a business, but there’s a human interest that’s being dismissed right now."
She said having the county superintendent who is "so overextended right now" review and approve administrators’ contracts was flawed. Hiring those administrators is a local responsibility.
"Each community has a personality different than the other," Ms. Bzdewka said. "If you look at Cranbury and Jamesburg, they’re similar in size, but have different needs and different personalities as a community. The only person that can intimately know what the needs of the community are is someone who lives and works there."
Similarly, Monroe school board President Kathy Kolupanowich said choosing a superintendent should remain a local decision.
"Everybody has different needs," she said. "I think the school district knows best what qualities they should be looking for, and to have somebody who doesn’t know the district well enough make the decision you know, you’re looking for a good superintendent-school board relationship and that could be taken away."
Monroe school board member Joe Homoki agreed.
"I really think that should be a board function," he said. "We are elected members and we are responsible to the voters. We should be able to hire and let go people who are not up to our standards."
Mr. Homoki, who chairs the board’s Committee on Finance, also said other duties of the executive county superintendent, like approval of the budget, unjustly take power away from the school district.
"I believe that the budget should be under local control," he said. "As it happens in Monroe, we have to submit the budget to the public for approval and I think that’s an indicator of how the superintendent is doing on a local level."
However, both Ms. Kolupanowich and Mr. Homoki were in favor of eliminating unnecessary state education mandates.
The process by which the state creates new mandates but doesn’t offer any money to pay for them is "counterproductive," Mr. Homoki.
Ms. Kolupanowhich said eliminating some mandates could save taxpayers money.
"Right now, the states mandates and the districts pay, and that money comes out of property tax," she said. "So, if they could do something to find out which mandates aren’t necessary, that would be one of the positive things to come out of this."
For the most part, school officials were unsure at this point whether or not anything being proposed by the state would actually be cost effective.
Jamesburg Board of Education President Don Peterson said the state is proposing so many plans that it is "imprudent" to guess at their effects without further research.
"What they’re trying to do is good, which is to reduce property taxes, but I don’t know that they’re fully aware of what the impact would be of what their proposing," Mr. Peterson said.

