By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
The Princeton Board of Education voted, 9-1, Tuesday to reject a proposal from a group led by former Mayor Richard Woodbridge and others to turn the former Valley Road School into a community center.
The school board cited a litany of reasons for its decision, outlined in a lengthy resolution that board members passed. Among other things, the Valley Road School-The Adaptive Reuse Committee failed to provide “credible, documented assurances that it has or can secure funding adequate for the extremely extensive” building renovations that a consultant for the district says will cost $10.8 million, the resolution says.
Another issue was that the committee wanted the school board to be responsible for seeking the necessary zoning changes to make the community center happen, according to the district.
The committee formed a nonprofit, Valley Road School Community Center Inc., for its effort.
Kip Cherry, representing the nonprofit at Tuesday’s meeting, urged the board to table or delay voting on the resolution, a view that board member Dan Haughton echoed. No other board member supported that idea, as he was the only one to vote against rejecting the proposal.
One school official later explained why the seven-page resolution was as long as it was.
”We felt that it was incumbent upon on us to spend as much time and care in our ultimate response to (the proposal) as the people involved in crafting the proposal had spent on it,” said school board vice president Andrea Spalla, a member of the board’s facilities committee.
The decision means there are no offers on the table for the property, although the town has expressed interest in using it for expanding the Witherspoon Street firehouse.
Councilman Lance Liverman, leading a task force that is looking at the needs of the fire department, said Wednesday that officials are not at a point where they could present the school board with a proposal for the building.
Mr. Woodbridge, an alumnus of the school, was not at the meeting. He had been a vocal critic of the district’s maintenance or lack thereof of the school. No longer used as a school, the building houses the district administration offices in one wing, while Princeton Community Television occupies another section. Corner House, another tenant, is planning to move to old Borough Hall at the end of April.
Nothing is stopping Mr. Woodbridge and the others from submitting another proposal to the school board.
”Rome wasn’t built in a day, and if you look at similar situations in other towns it often took a long time to make a community center work,” Mr. Woodbridge said in an email Thursday. “We are in this for the long haul and will keep on plugging and plugging and plugging until the Valley Road Building is put back into productive use for the benefit of the town.”
The school board had agreed to wait until this year to decide what to do with the former school. Officials have been clear that they are only making the section that fronts Witherspoon Street available. They have not ruled out needing to reuse it for school-related purposes in the future.
”The environment for public education in this state is very much in flux,” school board member Dorothy Bedford said, “and the board worries that over the medium term, we may in fact need to” use the property for education.

