EDITORIAL
The Board of Education has a new president, Harry Delgado, and a new vice president, Bryan Laurita.
It has a new member, Daniel Watts, who isn’t all that new. (He served on the board nearly 10 years ago.)
And it’s beginning work on its newest school building — a K-5 facility to be built on Deans Rhode Hall Road and Route 130.
But its problems remain the same as always — growth, growth and more growth.
The student population of South Brunswick schools has nearly doubled over the past decade. Since 1987, the board has reopened Greenbrook School, built and opened Indian Fields School and a new high school, and has converted the old high school into a middle school and the old middle school into an upper elementary school.
The board has hired loads of new teachers and administrators, added about 10 new sports teams at the high school and several dozen new clubs at all the schools.
This focus is unlikely to change as it looks to the future — especially in the short term. This year, the board plans to hire 67 new teachers and other staff to accommodate 360 new students. Longterm, the township anticipates somewhere in the neighborhood of another 10,000 or 12,000 residents moving in by the time South Brunswick reaches is maximum residential buildout. That would put the population at close to 50,000, and it could mean a school enrollment of more than 10,000 students — and the need for more teachers and more classrooms.
This focus on growth, however, should not deter the board from dealing with other pressing issues. Below are three areas we believe the board needs to focus on during the coming year:
‡ The district needs to determine what role it wants the school resource officer to play next year, especially in the high school.
The program places police officers in the district’s elementary schools, the Upper Elementary School, Crossroads Middle School and the high school. Police Chief Michael Paquette has said the officers are to be available for law enforcement, educational and counseling duties.
The scope of those duties need to be spelled out more specifically by the school board and a more cooperative method for selecting officers for the schools needs to be created to ensure the board and school staff have a say in who is policing their halls.
‡ The board needs to begin plans for redistricting South Brunswick schools. The new elementary school is scheduled to open in 2002. When it does, the district plans to send the fifth-graders back to the elementary schools. That means redrawing neighborhood boundary lines, an often acrimonious process that rarely makes everyone happy.
It is in the board’s interest to begin the process as early as possible and to ensure that the public is represented. The earlier the board gets started, the better chance it has of addressing the myriad concerns sure to be raised.
‡ The board should work with the township on its upcoming master plan review, possibly having a board member appointed to any township task force that is appointed.
This would offer the board several benefits. First, it would give board members a say in how the plan — and ultimately the township — is developed. It will allow the board to lobby for the designation of school sites in the plan, which would help ensure that potential school properties are not snapped up and developed as housing or businesses. And, just as important, it would give the board the kind of long-range information on development that could help members make decisions about the fate of its current buildings, all but two of which are more than 33 years old.
And throughout the year, whether it is talking about new teachers, the SRO, redistricting or any of the other issues sure to pop up, the board needs to remember to include the public in the process.