Is the Joke on Sea Bright?
Taxpayers and parents in Highlands, Atlantic Highlands and Sea Bright should all start paying attention, attending meetings and asking a lot of questions about school regionalization, whether Sea Bright will ever be included and whether there will be a vote on the matter in the November election.
Highlands council President Joann Olszewski and Atlantic Highlands resident Mark Fisher brought the matter up before the new transitional Henry Hudson Regional Board at its meeting Monday evening. They were the only citizens to ask questions of the regional board which was introducing a budget totaling $26.47 million for the next school year.
That’s for educating a total of 749 boys and girls from pre-K through 12th grade, or roughly, $35,327 per child. Yet only two people, a council president and a taxpaying parent, asked questions.
And last November, voters rejected adding Sea Bright into the district in spite of their assurance of more than one million dollars to offset costs to the boroughs.
At Monday’s meeting of the new regional board, the budget that was introduced is clearly temporary, introduced only to meet law requirements for the district. But it is also apparent the state Department of Education doesn’t quite know how to handle everything that’s involved with establishing a new district. Ironically it would not have been any more difficult for the state to figure out what it needs to do and what the district needs to do if the voters had approved Sea Bright and it and its million dollars was included in this new district, a district that simply includes the same schools in the same two towns that have been coordinating and sharing a lot of their programs for years.
Currently, of the 306 students in the 7 through 12 grades at Henry Hudson, 170 are from Atlantic Highlands and 124 from Highlands. There are 12 additional students who are in the district and paying tuition costs for the privilege. The totals represent nearly 58 per cent of the students are from Atlantic Highlands, and 42 percent from Highlands at the 7 to 12 level.
In addition, Highlands has 159 students at the PreK-6 level, or 36 percent of the total number of students from both towns who will eventually be at Henry Hudson. Atlantic Highlands has 284 students in PreK through 6, or 64 percent of the 443 Pre-K through 6th grade students in the two elementary schools.
Even with these figures, and the new board indicating it has had no communication with Sea Bright, nor knows anything about the status of the civil action brought by Shore regional and Oceanport because Sea Bright wants to join Henry Hudson, nor even of the status of the feasibility study update required to get the Sea Bright question on the ballot.
So where are the parents? Where are the taxpayers? Where are elected officials from Atlantic Highlands at the new board of education meetings?
It is necessary to ask questions in order to get answers. And it should be necessary to get all the answers, so people are aware of the high cost of education and the benefits of sharing costs with more than two towns, especially if a third town is not bringing in more students to offset any money that town brings in for paying the total bill.
It’s time for taxpayers to become better informed and better responsive to what’s going on in their towns.
