By Greg Forester, Staff Writer
The West Windsor-Plainsboro Board of Education is whole again, after board members voted unanimously Tuesday to appoint West Windsor resident John Farrell to fill a single empty seat.
Mr. Farrell, an assistant dean and finance professor at the College of Business Administration at Rider University, was selected from an unusually large pool of 10 applicants. That was an unprecedented level of interest from people looking to fill a mid-term vacancy on the board, according to West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District officials.
”It was a wonderful show of support for our schools,” said Gerri Hutner, the district’s director of communications.
The vacancy emerged after Stan Katz, a longtime board member, district statistician and demographer, made the decision to move to Colorado over the summer.
The selection of Mr. Farrell, whose son is the varsity quarterback at High School South, fulfills the board’s desire to get someone with education-related experience and good fiscal sense into Mr. Katz’s old seat.
Mr. Farrell is a University of Notre Dame graduate with a master of business administration from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He spent years working in various management positions at Ernst & Young and Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, along with a stint at the Unisys Corp.
”John has the finance experience that we were looking for,” said board President Hemant Marathe, who noted Mr. Farrell had assisted with coaching school sports and had a long history of helping the district.
Mr. Farrell’s seat comes up for election in the spring of 2009.
With Mr. Farrell’s appointment, the board is prepared to tackle the myriad set of issues facing the district.
That workload will include dealing with state-mandated changes made to school testing programs and general policies and regulations.
The test changes drew criticism from Mr. Marathe during a phone interview Wednesday.
Speaking for some on the board, Mr. Marathe said that the changes made to the New Jersey Assessment of Skill and Knowledge, given to students in fifth through eighth grade, could be problematic for the district.
”They have changed the standards by which students are judged,” said Mr. Marathe, who said comparisons of yearly student achievement on state-mandated testing could become meaningless.
Another target of criticism was state-mandated changes to general district guidelines and policies following the discovery of employee excesses at some school districts.
They were caught taking home taxpayer-funded food from board meetings and getting reimbursed for non-specific, seemingly inflated expenses allegedly incurred on education-related trips and seminars, according to district officials familiar with the problem.
In response, the state Department of Education revised statutes to prevent future excesses, but all public education workers including those in non-offending districts will now be forced to comply.
Some board officials from West Windsor and Plainsboro who voted on a handful of the new regulations at Tuesday’s meeting criticized some of the new policies.
One, which prohibits board members and district officials from taking home take-out containers of food left over from meetings, was “silly and foolish,” according board officials.
”The board members feel that certain districts did something wrong, and we are troubled that the state is treating all districts the same,” said Mr. Marathe. “It’s a mistake to treat everyone the same.”
New policies are requiring districts to put work and research into compliance, according to Ms. Hutner, who said a need for hiring costly attorney assistance could arise from the new regulations, which were first proposed to save taxpayer dollars.
”Some district are paying outside people to help,” Ms. Hutner said.
