by Peter Geier, Staff Writer
ROBBINSVILLE — The school board hopes to find enough lead in its budgetary pencil to add classroom space in its elementary and middle schools in the upcoming school year to maintain its elementary class size caps at 22 pupils.
The board and administration have been working to complete the 2009-2010 budget in meetings this week, though Monday night’s meeting was cancelled because of the snowstorm.
Superintendent John Szabo said last week that the district wants to add four classrooms, in modular units, to the Sharon Elementary School and two classrooms to the Pond Road Middle School by renovating the current media center, he said. Neither he nor the school board, at its Feb. 24 meeting, discussed cost estimates.
Both schools house more children then they were designed to accommodate, and the district expects increased class rolls when the schools open their doors in the fall, Dr. Szabo has said. The superintendent has said the township’s growing population — the result of an influx of young families that could add as many as two new kindergarten classes next year — in addition to other demands on the system, such as special education, is creating a situation that could cause the schools to burst at the seams.
The New Jersey Department of Education Report Card for the district shows that Robbinsville’s class sizes for kindergarten and the first three grades in the 2007-2008 school year were slightly higher than state averages.
The district’s average kindergarten class size was 19.5 pupils as compared to a state average of 18.6. There was an average 20.5 first-graders here, compared to a state average of 19.4; 21-second graders, to a state average 19.7; and 21.6 third-graders, to a state average of 20.1, according to the DOE.
U.S. Census figures show that Robbinsville’s population grew from 5,800 in 1990 to 11,900 in 2006. Dr. Szabo noted at a board meeting in December that the number of children in the district has grown from 150 to 2,700 in the last decade.
Sharon Elementary School could grow by adding two modular units to the two units already in service there, Dr. Szabo said. Each unit has two rooms, though one of the four rooms already in use is a bathroom. Those two additional units containing four classrooms would help to alleviate overcrowding, he said.
Dr. Szabo said in December that the district has to decide soon on this short-term solution in order to have the units in place when the school opens its doors this fall, because it could take as much as six months to get the necessary paperwork and permits in order.
New school construction is another option the school board has considered, though such a step would require the board to put the question to local taxpayers in a referendum.

