James Ahearn of The Record has a column in which he lambastes Democrats in Trenton for supporting Corzine’s creation of the position of Executive County Superintendent to push school consolidation. His opposition to this plan is based on the premise that even non-operating districts, those without schools that pay tuition to send their kids to other districts, are waste-free, efficient, and allow towns to maintain local control.
But what’s his real beef? He acknowledges that all mergers would be subject to voter approval; even one district giving a thumbs-down would be enough to quash the deal. Then Ahearn adds,
For example, northeast Bergen County is now served by the Northern Valley Regional High School District, which operates two high schools. Seven elementary districts, plus Rockleigh, feed students into the high schools. Each district is independent. In place of this system, there would be a single district.
Results would be similar with sending-receiving high school districts like the one in which Maywood and Rochelle Park, largely white, middle-class elementary districts, send students to racially diverse Hackensack High School. The separate sending-receiving and elementary districts would be merged in a single pre-K to Grade 12 district that would also include South Hackensack.
So the “largely white, middle class elementary districts” with “woodsy estates, with big houses and many horses,” would be coerced to integrate their kids with “racially diverse” Hackensack, which presumably doesn’t have big houses and horses? Is that his problem?
We hope not.
Let’s leave any latent racism aside. Ahearn bases his argument on the somewhat tautological assumption that there are examples of fiscal efficiencies in the tiny districts he describes, Teterboro (total population 50) and Rockleigh (total population 400). But the efficiencies exist only because the districts do. Sure, the part-time business administrator and the secretary are a bargain, but only because Teterboro and Rockleigh have to hire them at all.
Consolidation proffers many problems with its solutions: negotiating variable tax rates, distributing debt service, managing transportation, combining collective bargaining agreements, etc. But one of those problems is not the consolidation of woodsy idylls and “diverse” dens of iniquity. New Jersey is that oxymoronic union, and we serve all our children better – those in Rockleigh and those in Hackensack – by serving them together.
