By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
The Princeton School District will make a “nonbinding” offer to acquire an undisclosed property at market value so that officials can move administrators and other staff out of the Valley Road administration building so it can be turned into a school again.
The Board of Education voted Tuesday to authorize the district take that step on a property that board President Patrick Sullivan said after the meeting is in Princeton. He and other officials would not say where the parcel is located exactly, but a source familiar with the matter said the property is not the former Princeton Packet building on Witherspoon Street.
Board Vice President Dafna Kendal, chairwoman of the board facilities committee, said Wednesday that the district had signed a confidentiality agreement with the seller, and that the property already has a building on it.
The purchase, however, is contingent on voters next year approving a facilities bond referendum that the district has said it plans to have on the ballot in October. Moving employees out of the Valley Road building would free that space up to become a school for fifth-and sixth-graders, although it is not clear at this stage whether that will mean renovating the building or demolishing it and constructing a new one.
During the board meeting, Superintendent of Schools Stephen C. Cochrane touched on the “many needs that are driving our planning for a facilities referendum” from security, athletic and other needs to what he called the “most critical need” of “space.”
“And that need is being driven plainly and simply by rapidly rising enrollment,” he said in pointing to enrollment data.
Since he has been leading the district starting in January 2014, enrollment is up 10 percent, or some 350 students, he said. Princeton, he continued, is “at or over capacity at all (grade) levels.”
Enrollment at the four elementary schools, as of last Thursday, stood at 1,432 students, he said of a district that is already exceeding its demographer’s forecast at the elementary level. Meanwhile, John Witherspoon Middle School, at 725 students, and Princeton High School, at 1,620, also are over capacity, according to a slide Cochrane showed as part of his presentation.
“The numbers are there, and people are continuing to move into our community,” he said. “So I do think that we have a need to be looking very responsibly at expanding our facilities and our space for what is an inevitably a rising enrollment.”
No relief is in sight, either. He said the district’s demographer has projected “continued growth for the next ten years,” something Princeton needs to “plan for,” in Cochrane’s words.
He showed that JW is forecast to have 800 students by 2020 and 900 by 2026; the high school will have 1,825 students by 2025; and the elementary schools will be up “another” 130 students by 2025.
This comes with the municipality still waiting on a Mercer County Superior Court judge’s ruling on what its affordable housing requirement will be, one of the considerations for the district.
For the referendum, the district has hired Spiezle Architectural Group, with the firm also working with Fielding Nair International on the “design phase” of the project.
That phase will start in January, when the district has scheduled back-to-back information meetings for parents and the community, Jan. 10 starting at 7 p.m. and the other on Jan. 11 at 9:30 a.m., both in the middle school auditorium.
