By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
The Christie administration should reject a proposal by the Princeton Charter School to expand its enrollment, according to a resolution that the Princeton Council will consider at its meeting Monday night at 7., The council will weigh in on an issue that has inflamed passions in the community, saw the local school district sue the charter school and now will play out at a meeting expected to attract a crowd on a bad weather night. The resolution, which is not binding legally, asks acting Education Commissioner Kim Harrington to “deny” the request to add 76 more students., The measure says, in part, the expansion “was planned, and its application submitted, without any consultation with the duly elected Princeton Board of Education, the administration of Princeton Public Schools or Princeton taxpayers.” If approved, it would require the school district to give an extra $1.1 million to the Charter School, which gets state and local funding., Council President Jenny Crumiller said Monday she “likely” would vote for the resolution based on the “the severe financial impact … on taxpayers, because it’s going to divert money from the public school system to the charter school system.”, The Charter School, started in 1997, is a public school that is not governed by the local board of education. The state is expected to decide the expansion request in March., Princeton Superintendent of Schools Stephen C. Cochrane, who plans to attend the council meeting, said Monday that he is “delighted” to see the council “considering this.” He said the expansion is not in “the educational and economic interests of the community as a whole.”, Paul Josephson, the president of the Charter School Board of Trustees, did not have any immediate comment Monday. The Charter School has said adding more students would help with diversifying its student body, particularly with more low-income children, and help alleviate a space crunch in other district schools., “With the town experiencing a significant spike in enrollment due to new residential developments coming online, the Princeton school district has already acknowledged the need to expand its facilities to accommodate many new students in the community,” according to a message on the Charter School website. “This proposal, if approved, will allow Princeton to absorb a significant number of the new students and give them a great educational option.”, As part of its application to the state, the Charter School wants to adjust the lottery-based admission process to give more weight to poor students. Mayor Liz Lempert, a critic of the expansion proposal, on Monday dismissed a question at her press conference that she and other opponents effectively are barring those kids from the Charter School., “I feel like they should’ve been doing that from the very beginning,” Mayor Lempert said. “If they wanted to change how they did the lottery, I don’t think there’d be a problem with that.”
