Pay to Play, Part 2

For a couple of weeks each summer, Triangle Road in front of Hillsborough Middle School becomes a parking lot for 30 minutes around 9am and again around noon. The reason is the multi-decade-long success of the school district's summer enrichment program.

The self-sustaining initiative consists of two weeks of three-hour-per-day, week-long classes designed and primarily taught by district teachers. Students in 1st through 8th grade and their parents choose a topic of interest for either or both of the two weeks. When my kids took advantage of the program a decade or more ago the price for a class was $105 - or about $7 an hour.

Classes ranged from recreational to academic. I remember my daughter taking scrapbooking and theater while my son did computers and robotics, for example.

The takeaway is that parents knew what they were getting—most sessions included a project or some concrete culmination of the week's work - and were happy to pay for it.

During my second term on the school board around 2010, I began to think of ways to build on the success of Summer Enrichment. It wasn't hard to see how this model could be used to revamp after-school clubs and activities at the 5th-6th and 7th-8th schools in Hillsborough.

Clubs at this level were also recreational, academic, and service-oriented—and don't forget middle school sports. But aside from the sports, clubs—supervised by a contractually appointed teacher advisor—seemed to meet irregularly and had little accountability as to their value. And because parents weren't paying anything, their involvement was limited.

My proposal, which I presented to the newly hired superintendent in 2011, included the following.

• Create three sessions during the school year - Fall, Winter, and Spring Enrichment corresponding with the athletic seasons.
• Allow teachers to design and submit proposals for perhaps ten 90-minute after-school sessions—analogous to the 15-hour Summer Enrichment Program—over a 10-week period.
• Charge parents the same fee as they would pay at Summer Enrichment.
• Have these fees apply to the middle school sports program as well.

As I wrote in a previous column, I believe that parents of 5th through 8th-grade students are already paying for their children's activities, and the school district shouldn't be unfairly competing against these other businesses by offering so many taxpayer-funded pastimes in this age group.

One of the complaints I heard from parents and students - especially middle school students - during my years on the school board was that they were locked out of certain clubs and activities because they were already committed to another. For example - a child couldn't be in the school play because that was a full-year commitment, and he or she played a sport during one of the seasons. In the new three-season enrichment program, students could participate in their sport and be in the school play during a subsequent session. 

The complaint I heard over the years from fellow board members about after-school activities for these younger students was that the board members wanted more activities that were "co-curricular"—in other words, more educational. Teachers would undoubtedly be able to provide this in twice-weekly 45-minute sessions before or after school.

In the end, none of my suggestions caught on. 

Pay to Play, Part 1

In the summer of 2019 (when else?), the Hillsborough Township Board of Education adopted a policy calling for participation fees to be collected from students for most activities and athletics - the so-called "Pay-to-Play" policy. I was on the board then and opposed the policy as it was developed. I had different ideas.

I have always found that policies work best - and can best be defended to a skeptical public - when they are grounded in a sure philosophy. In this instance, the philosophical underpinnings that should have guided the board are that school - especially high school - is not only what happens between the first and last bell. Academic and social clubs - and especially athletics - are sometimes erroneously thought of as add-ons to the high school experience. This is not true. They are integral to it.

Charging a fee, even if it's only $100 per sport, is antithetical to our goal of having a barrier-free high school experience. And by the way, it's never just $100. If you have a couple of kids in school playing two or three sports per year, it can add up quickly. It was my firm belief then, as it is now, that the general public does not resent paying for the full cost of clubs and sports at the high school. They recognize the value of it.

If I had let my opposition to the policy rest there, I could have just shrugged my shoulders and moved on. But the truth is that I was never opposed to participation fees being collected from the younger students - namely 5th through 8th grade. At that level, parents routinely pay for all of their child's many after-school activities - sports leagues, martial arts, dance, scouting, etc. There is no reason the school district should compete with these businesses by offering free activities for 11-year-olds.

In fact - I had a whole concept for a 5th - 8th-grade after-school enrichment program that I first discussed with the superintendent way back in 2011. I will discuss that in the next installment.

[It should also be noted that, whereas the budget in Hillsborough for high school athletics is around $1 million, the participation fees collected - when I reported on this as a board member - only covered around 15% of that.]

Lincoln on Education

For the 215th birthday of our 2nd greatest president, let's enjoy some Abraham Lincoln quotes regarding education.

Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in. That every man may receive at least a moderate education...appears to be an object of vital importance...

Every head should be cultivated.

Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.

All I have learned, I learned from books.

When I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher to the Rule of Three.... The little advance I now have upon this store of education, I have picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity.

And the most important for our times:

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.

 

The Strategic Plan

"It's time for the new strategic plan." No seven words evince more fear and loathing in the veteran school board member than that one short sentence. And if they don't, you're doing it wrong.

Every five to seven years, a school district will need to create a plan for the future encompassing items such as curriculum, facilities, staffing, and finances. The buzzword of the day will be "sustainable" - but that's a canard. The school district is never going out of business.

As a five-term school board member, I participated to varying degrees in three strategic plans. And let me be clear - I observed people with earnest intentions trying to steer the district in the direction they wanted it to go. I refrain from labeling their intentions as "good" because their intentions were never the same as mine.

If you are a conservative school board member attempting to represent - in the case of a town like Hillsborough - the views of at least half of the residents, you will be thwarted. The education establishment has many ways to stop you - here are a few:

• Public Input via Email - The superintendent will solicit input from the public in an attempt to learn what their priorities are. The "public" who submit their ideas will consist overwhelmingly of teachers and other school employees.
• Public Forums - The board will hold several public forums and workshops. These will be attended largely by teachers, et. al. (see above).
• Board Members Roundtable  - The superintendent may suggest principals, supervisors, high-level administrators, and board members break into groups to discuss priorities. Board members will be outnumbered three to one in each group.

As the Hillsborough school district works through its strategic plan this year, pay attention to what you are hearing. Will there be even one item that might satisfy a traditional/conservative constituent? 

Not if they can help it.

"Bursting at the Seams?"

"Building is out of control in this town!" Okay. "Why must there be apartment buildings on every available piece of land?" I hear you. "We can't keep adding houses everywhere; the schools are bursting at the seams!" Now you've lost me.

Counting the number of students in the schools and predicting how many there will be tomorrow - or five years from now - is fundamental to a well-run district. So why is it so hard? And why is there so much confusion?

After nearly sixteen years of service as a school board member in New Jersey, I conclude that the confusion is on purpose.

Education of the K-12 variety has become an industry. And the industry needs customers. Unlike other industries - where a dwindling customer base would be taken care of by a free market - the government schools have no pressure to scale down. All they want to do is keep the train on the tracks. If enrollment isn't growing, it's hard to justify increased spending - so they have to pretend.

The Hillsborough Township, New Jersey School District currently has 7,226 students across its nine schools. That is 435 FEWER students than the peak year when there were 7,661 students in the district. That was 2005 - EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO. 

Yet I constantly hear that the schools are "bursting at the seams." How can this be? More importantly, why did the rampant development in the town over the past twenty years not cause a tremendous INCREASE in enrollment but instead result in a DECREASE? And finally, why are there so many that don't know the truth?

We can answer the second question first with what sounds like a copout - the "rampant development" just didn't happen. The question is flawed. In this case, you actually can't believe your lying eyes. Hillsborough's population increased by a relatively paltry 6,000 between 2000 and 2020. That's a mere 18%. As a comparison, between 1970 and 1990, the township's population increased from 11,000 to nearly 29,000 - an 18,000-person, 160% increase! Those were the decades of "rampant development" - not the past 20 years.

Even so, shouldn't a population increase of 6,000 add some students to the school system? Yes - and it did, at first. School enrollments increased between 2000 and 2005 before heading in the other direction and bottoming out at 7,126 in 2015. Birth rates in Hillsborough simply did not keep pace with all of the new bedrooms being built. In 2002, the Auten Road Elementary School was doubled in size to become the Auten Road Intermediate School (grades 5-6), and the final of three major additions was completed at the high school, doubling its capacity from the original building of 1969. There have been no projects to increase school capacity since that time.

So, if there are 435 fewer students enrolled now than in 2005, and school capacity has remained the same, why is there a prevalent narrative that says the schools are overcrowded? The answer is that over the past 18 years, the state has changed the definition of full capacity. In other words, you no longer have what you paid for.

For example, in 2001, when voters went to the polls to approve the construction projects at ARIS and the high school, they were told that the project would increase the high school capacity from 2,100 to 2,600 students. Yet today, the state uses something called Facility Efficiency Standards to calculate that the current high school has a capacity of 1,517. Somewhere along the line, the residents of Hillsborough have lost space for over 1,000 students. That is space that they paid for - and it's all gone. 

The same is true of every school in the district. What we thought were elementary schools with a maximum enrollment of 600 are now down to an FES maximum of around 400. This is a real kick to longtime residents who paid for the schools to be built and expanded numerous times.

One last note...over the years, Hillsborough has commissioned demographic studies to predict and plan for future enrollment. Despite the fact that their entire business is built on PREDICTION, they have a mountain of excuses when their prognostication fails. In Hillsborough's case, they consistently predict a far more significant increase in school-aged children than what actually occurs - and they are resistant to any retroactive studies to see how their predictions have fared in the past. Another board member and I tried several times to get a demographer to look back on past predictions and hold themselves to account but faced nothing but poor excuses. 

The 2018 Enrollment Projection and Facility Utilization Study predicted an enrollment of 7,723 students for the 2023-24 school year. As reported at a December 2023 school board meeting, current enrollment is 7,226.

A New High School for Hillsborough? Part Two

In Part One I wrote about how, in the final years of my tenure on the Hillsborough Township Board of Education, there was a big push to do something about the outdated, overcrowded high school. The first question I asked when this subject came up was, "If a school with a capacity for 2,400 students has fewer than 2,400 students enrolled, how can it be overcrowded?"

The school is overcrowded in two ways that are tied together. Firstly, we can measure the capacity of the school by the number of classrooms. If a school has eighty classrooms designed for 30 students each, that gives us a maximum capacity of 2,400. The issue is that we don't use classrooms in the same way we did fifty years ago. Some classrooms will need to have fewer students - there is no getting around it.

Secondly, the basic infrastructure is too small. A school constructed fifty-four years ago with a limited ability for expansion was soon expanded far beyond that. That means the hallways are too small with several choke points and limited routes to get from one area to another - especially with the current enrollment. And common areas such as the cafeteria are overcrowded.

The "unlimited money" solution to this problem is to erect a new 2500-plus capacity high school on a new site and turn the current high school into a 6-7-8 middle school - thereby reducing the number of students in the building to fewer than 1800 and relieving the congestion in the hallways and the strain on the bathrooms, cafeteria, gyms, auditorium, and other common areas.

Setting aside the money issue (likely to be an immediate $1,000 increase on everyone's annual tax bill) the question becomes where to build a new school. The current high school site has many advantages. One is that it is centrally located. It also has good access to roads - three in fact! I know that some bemoan its location on the busy Amwell Road, but imagine if the school was tucked into a quiet residential development at the end of a cul-de-sac. 

The suggestion to build a new high school at the site of the former GSA Depot was explored in 1995 and has come up again from time to time as the land has been cleaned up and is available for development. But are there any other solutions? Can anything be done on the current high school site to alleviate the issues?

I have a few ideas - this is one:

1. Acquire the land at the GSA Depot.
2. Relocate the practice fields and baseball and softball diamonds to the GSA Depot.
3. Construct a cart path between the high school and the GSA Depot.
4. Build a new arts center/auditorium at the vacated soccer fields.
5. Reconfigure the current auditorium and music instruction rooms into classroom space.
6. Put a sign up at the GSA Depot site reading, "Future Home of Hillsborough High School".
7. Wait.

This simplified plan doesn't address all of the details and doesn't solve all of the issues but it plans for the future while buying time to see where enrollment goes. A new high school can be erected later. A centrally-located high-seating capacity arts center can always be used even after the current high school is converted into a middle school.

A New High School for Hillsborough? Part One

In 1995, Hillsborough High School was beginning to become overcrowded. The 26-year-old high school was 150 students beyond its 1,350-student capacity with no end in sight. Besides, the school already seemed outdated.

The school board believed that the solution to this problem was to build a brand-new high school and to reconfigure the other schools  - notably making the 1969 high school a 6-8 school. I have written about that plan - and the two rejected referenda that followed - and you can read about it here. Since then, the current high school has been expanded twice to its current nominal capacity of 2,400 students - but the talk of building a new high school persists.

A few years ago, a new fancy high school proposal was floated. A presentation by the high school principal condemned the current high school - once again - as being overcrowded and outdated.

There is no doubt that the two additions to the high school in the late 90s and early 2000s while adding classrooms, did not adequately address the common area issues. The cafeteria, the hallways, etc. are still small. Imagine building a skyscraper with just enough elevator capacity to reach the top floor, and then adding 50 more floors on top of that with no ability to build more elevator shafts. It won't work.

One of the reasons that the first 1995 high school referendum was rejected was that people objected to the site at the corner of Beekman Lane and New Center Road. They were concerned that the site was too far from the population centers of the 54-square-mile township and worried about what bringing sewers to that part of town would do to its rural character. 

Before the second 1995 referendum, the school board published a map denoting the 15 properties in Hillsborough that were considered for the high school, and why 14 of them were rejected. The referendum still failed.

During one of my final years on the school board - 25 years after the failed referendum - I accompanied the superintendent on a site visit to two of the rejected sites from 1995. One was the site bounded by North Willow Road on the west, Hamilton Road on the north, and Amwell Road on the south. This property was rejected by the school board in 1995 because of the presence of a major gas pipeline and substantial wetlands. Those conditions were unchanged in 2021.

The other site I visited was the Belle Mead GSA Depot. Since 1995, the southern half of the tract had been purchased by Somerset County and became Mountain View Park. Now the northern part of the property was controlled by the Hillsborough Township Committee and was available for development.

The difference with this property was that there had been significant changes since it was rejected by the school board in 1995 for "environmental reasons". The property had undergone a multimillion-dollar cleanup and was just awaiting final testing to be given the "all-clear".

So...what to do? I will give you my thoughts in Part Two!