More than 250 residents of West Windsor, Plainsboro, South Brunswick, and Princeton crammed the South Brunswick Zoning Board meeting on April 14 to fight – either in support for or opposition of the Princeton International Academy Charter School (PIACS).
But residents on both sides of the aisle will have to wait for a decision on whether the school can open in September at a location on 12 Perrine Road, near the Plainsboro border. After hours of testimony that carried the hearing past midnight, the South Brunswick Zoning Board adjourned it to Thursday, June 2.
PIACS was appearing before the board for a use variance for a charter school and a private school facility at 12 Perrine Road in an office-research zone.
During the April 14 meeting, PIACS’s witnesses, including the architect and owner, testified. Residents were allowed to ask questions. The board did not get to testimony from PIACS’s traffic engineer, who will testify on June 2, when residents will also be again able to ask questions and make comments.
The application on behalf of the charter school was made by 12 P & Associates, LLC, of Lake Drive in Princeton – which is also listed as the contract purchaser. Critics of the school have noted that the Helena May, former PIACS trustee, is the owner of 12 P & Associates. PIACS founder Bonnie Liao confirmed this in an online interview, saying that May resigned from the board in March “with intentions of having 12 P purchase the Perrine Road facility, pending zoning board approval for PIACS.” She insisted she was not in it to make a profit.
Liao also confirmed that the application is not only for a charter school, but also for a private school, the YingHua Day School, which would move to the location. Liao founded the private school in 2007. She insisted that the charter school will not subsidize the private school and that each school would be a separate entity, and that everything was being done legally.
This concept was the focus for many of the opponents’ concerns during the meeting.
“The applicant could not answer questions as to how exactly the building is going to be divided by the charter school and the private school, which is owned by the same person,” said WW-P School Board President Hemant Marathe, who attended the meeting. “The main question is going to be whether the money going to the charter school (from taxpayers) is going to also fund the private school. A lot of questions have yet to be answered.”
Documents provided by PIACS show that the charter school is applying to allow the establishment of a 13,790-square foot charter school for kindergarten through fifth grades and a 2,115-square foot not-for-profit private school for pre-K through second grades, in an existing 45,340-square foot building, the remainder of which will be vacant for “possible future expansion of a related educational use.”
“The facility is currently used partly as office space and partly as a liquor warehouse,” said Parker Block, the spokesman for PIACS. “It is surrounded by residential property whose value would be enhanced if the facility were used as a school rather than for its current purpose.”
The charter school, which hopes to open this September, will consist of students from the Princeton, South Brunswick, and WW-P school districts. The school will be the first to offer an International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum framework as well as dual language Mandarin-English immersion.
WW-P officials are fighting the application. Marathe sent a letter urging PTA members to attend the zoning hearing to oppose the application. He told them that if PIACS opens in September, it could draw over 100 students from WW-P and take $1.2 million of district taxpayer dollars. Loss of that would be equivalent to elimination of 17 teaching positions, one-half of the sports teams and extra curricular activities, and most of the music programs, he wrote.
