NJ Education Report

The Star-Ledger reports on the dismissal of a 3-year-old class action suit, Crawford v. Davy, which would have distributed vouchers to students in 96 chronically-troubled schools.

Out-sourcing non-instructional school functions is starting to look more attractive to Jersey school districts that face inevitable state aid cuts. In Trenton, reports The Times of Trenton, the school district and the mechanics and laborers union have been unable to arrive at a settlement so the Board is thinking about taking bids from outside contractors. (This shouldn’t come as a surprise to the union president, Frank Deangelo, who is also a member of the State Assembly: last year Trenton laid off 177 cafeteria workers and hired an outside firm to manage food services.) The same scenario is unfolding in Alexandria School District.

Diane D’amico at The Press of Atlantic City gets chills from the latest eruption of the Senate Education Committee, which approved a bill [S 709]that would “require school districts to relocate all students if the temperature in their classroom falls below 63 degrees Fahrenheit, or above 89 degrees.” (The bill also appropriates $100,000 for, well, something: oversight, implementation, maybe new thermometers.)

In Maurice River Township, a technology teacher has come up with a way to replicate “smart boards.” The Board was planning on approving about $83K to buy 16 of them at $5,288 a pop. The tech teacher’s version will cost about $2K each.

The business administrator, the attorney, and a Board member at Hoboken Public School District are resigning; it’s unclear whether the resignations are related to a financial audit that found “more than two dozen irregularities,” reports the Hoboken News.