By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Mayor Liz Lempert, an ally of the public school district, on Monday threw her support behind having a school facilities bond referendum in Princeton and offered qualified backing for the district to obtain the campus of Rider University’s Westminster Choir College.
“I would say this is a community that highly values education and that understands the value of our public schools and is very supportive of our public schools,” she said at her press conference Monday.
The district is feeling an enrollment pinch, with the prospect of more children as additional residential development gets built in town. Mayor Lempert credited the district for planning for that growth and stressed the need for the school system to have “appropriate facilities.”
“So there’s several ways to create space for increased enrollment,” she said. “One is to acquire additional property, the other is to expand on existing campuses.”
She said she “would be” supportive of the district’s attempt to acquire the Westminster property if school officials have “gone through an analysis that is looking at the various options and if they see that as the most cost-effective in the long run, I would be supportive.”
The district has made an undisclosed offer to Rider for the more than 20 acres of land contiguous to Princeton High School and John Witherspoon Middle School. Officials are waiting to learn if they are among the finalists still in consideration.
For her part, Council President Jenny Crumiller, also at the mayor’s press conference, said she would “most likely” support the district’s bid for the property if officials think the acquisition is justified.
“But I don’t know enough about the enrollment figures, the predictions or anything about the numbers to support it right now,” said Crumiller, unaware of the district’s offer for the campus.
In the meantime, Superintendent of Schools Stephen C. Cochrane is pressing ahead with a facilities bond referendum, to go before voters in March, that would include, among other things, an addition to Princeton High School to create classrooms and other space.
Later in her remarks, Mayor Lempert said there was a need to have the referendum, the only way for the district to bond for capital improvements.
“And as a community, every ten years, I believe it’s vital that we invest in our school infrastructure. It’s one of the jewels of the community we live in. Anybody who has a child has benefited from the school facilities. And I believe every generation has an obligation to continue to invest in them.”
Mayor Lempert has sent one daughter through the school system, and has another still in it. She is part of the larger network of school advocates within the community and moves in the same social and political circles as past and current school board members. Usually guarded in her public comments, she minced no words in saying a bond referendum was critical.
“But I think that the option of not having a referendum and not investing in the infrastructure would be a total disaster and I think the community recognizes that,” she said.
She cited the dilapidated old Valley Road School, a building on Witherspoon Street that she can see from outside the window of her office in Witherspoon Hall, as “a lesson of what can happen when there’s not that investment.”
