To the editor:
I served as a member of the Princeton Regional Board of Education over 30 years ago (1981-87). We had a very hard time dealing with declining enrollment and faced tough decisions about which neighborhood elementary schools to close.
This experience does not qualify me to answer the current question of how to deal with increasing enrollment, especially at Princeton High School.
However, I learned one lesson that may be of use today: don’t lose sight of our mission to provide the best education to the town’s children within the financial constraints of the community’s resources. It would have been easy, but wrong, to keep all four schools open and simply bill our taxpayers for that luxury.
Today, I have serious misgivings about how our Board of Education is working through the knotty issue of enrollment changes.
Specifically, I am disappointed the current board appears to have renewed a 10-year send-receiving relationship with Cranbury prior to deciding how to address significant expansion of the high school. The renewal decision removes one major means of reducing the enrollment problem that necessitates such expansion.
Was this a backdoor attempt to force approval of the bond? Did the board simply presume the community would approve the construction program before public discussion?
Why wasn’t the Cranbury decision delayed until after the community voted on the proposed bond? The order in which these two major issues are being addressed seems backward at best and raises a concern about the school board’s sensitivity to the financial constraints of our citizens.
Harry Levine
Princeton