NJ Education Report

James Ahearn, editorialist for The Record, considers Lakewood Public Schools:

The school district budget for the coming year, totaling $133 million, includes $30 million, or 23 percent, for aid to private schools, almost all of them yeshivas. Today, just six months after Thanksgiving, there are 85 yeshivas, up from 74, with another eight set to open this summer.

The private school aid, supplemented by state and federal money, takes several forms in addition to busing: textbooks, remedial tutoring, school nurses and workshops for teachers. No surprises there.

But it also subsidizes some unusual items, including Hebrew grammar lessons, rent paid by the yeshivas and tuition for disabled Hasidic students to attend Jewish summer camps in upstate New York.

Called Camps Sternberg and Mogen Avraham, their website offers kids “the opportunity to explore their individual and unique kochos in a healthy and positive Torah atmosphere.” Kochos is Yiddish for “faculties of the soul.”

The $30 million does not include $12.5 million in tuition for 130 disabled students, virtually all of them Hasidic, who attend a School for Children with Hidden Intelligence, or SCHI.

For more specific examples, look at the Lakewood Board of Education meeting minutes from May 31st, Superintendent’s Recommendation #14. You may also notice that, in spite of state code that requires that school districts publish minutes of meeting within 30 days, the last School Board meeting minutes published go back to early March.

This information about inequities between private yeshiva students and the mostly Hispanic public school students — both in special and regular ed — is familiar to NJ Left Behind readers. (See my 2010 post on SCHI, “Leave Your Foreskins at the Door” and last year’s “Lakewood’s Voucher Program.”) Lakewood’s woes have been much in the news lately, especially since the Asbury Park Press published a series called “Cheated.” The district is currently operating without a superintendent and fired its high school principal, who had been on the job since August, because it was revealed that half the senior class is ineligible for graduation. Also he signed off on Lakewood’s SIG grant (a federal program that gives aid to chronically failing schools) because the graduation rate was artificially lowered to qualify for the grant.

On that grant (application here) the high school’s graduation rate was listed as 37%. According to the new School Report Cards, it’s actually 70%.

The new high school principal, whoever that is, will be the fourth within four years.
The newly-appointed interim superintendent, Laura Winters, was a teacher in the district who was appointed as principal of one of the elementary schools in September. She will be the fourth superintendent since the school year 2007-2008.

Ahearn also takes note of “a former elementary school principal who admitted misleading parents of disabled students on special-education availability to protect his $139,000-a-year job.” (My story here.) The erstwhile principal was replaced, and that replacement is now the interim superintendent.