PACKET EDITORIAL, Sept. 7
By: Packet Editorial, Sept. 7
The Julian calendar says the new year begins on the first day of January but for most of us, the real new year arrives the first week in September. Whether we’re 6 or 60, it’s hard to mark the passage of another year in our lives by anything other than the opening of school.
Summer’s over. Time to pack up the white shoes and pocketbooks. Take the tags off the new clothes. Clean out the briefcase, sharpen the pencils, pack the lunch box. Clear the cobwebs from your brain. And resolve that this year’s going to be the best one ever the best grades, the best friends, the best social life, the best everything.
As this ritual unfolds in countless households across our area this week, parents are no doubt feeling the same combination of excitement and anxiety as their school-bound children. Fortunately, as they consider the state of our local school districts, and think back to what things were like just a year or two ago, they’re likely to find that the start of the 2001-2002 school year offers much more cause for excitement than anxiety.
Turn the clock back to the start of the 1999-2000 school year. The Princeton Regional School District was reeling from the revelation that it had just overspent its budget by $1 million. Relations between the school board and its secretary/business administrator were icy. The district’s leadership was in turmoil, headed by the second of three interim superintendents who would run the district over a span of more than two years. Earlier, the board’s favored candidate for the superintendency had turned the job down, another had withdrawn his name from consideration and a third the disfavored secretary/business administrator had been passed over for the job.
Meanwhile, in West Windsor-Plainsboro, students arrived on the first day of school without knowing whether their teachers would be working or striking. Following a spring of discontent and a summer of smoldering resentment, relations between the teachers’ union and the school board had hit rock-bottom and negotiations had reached an impasse. Finally, after a marathon negotiating session that ended at 6:30 in the morning of the opening day of school, the teachers decided to go to work. But they still didn’t have a contract and they greeted the kids with picket signs.
Last year, it was Montgomery’s turn to open school in an atmosphere of uncertainty. Like Princeton the year before, Montgomery had an interim superintendent. One of the district’s schools couldn’t open because of a serious mold problem. And voters would be going to the polls a month later to decide the fate of a record-setting $70 million bond issue for a new high school. (The only larger proposed school bond issue in New Jersey history was for $89 million in neighboring Franklin Township a year earlier and it was soundly defeated.)
But Montgomery voters passed that bond issue, and this year the district will start building the new high school. Montgomery also has a permanent superintendent. So does Princeton, where an even larger bond issue approved in the spring of 2001 will finance much-needed renovation and expansion for all the district’s schools. In West Windsor-Plainsboro, this school year begins with none of the labor unrest that made the start of the 1999-2000 school year so unpleasant.
Each district has its new challenges, to be sure. In Princeton, the expansion and renovation plans continue to draw criticism as a letter elsewhere on this page demonstrates. In West Windsor-Plainsboro, debate is raging over the touchy issue of grade configuration as five letters on the next page attest. In Montgomery, things didn’t go quite as smoothly as planned in opening up trailers to relieve overcrowding at the high school as a story in today’s paper reports.
Still, the 2001-2002 school year begins with considerable cause for optimism in all three of our local districts. We can’t help but mark the occasion with an appropriate seasonal greeting: Happy New Year!