Approval of the new Princeton International Academy Charter School (PIACS) by the outgoing Corzine administration has led to much debate in the three affected school districts (Princeton, West Windsor-Plainsboro, and South Brunswick). We believe the debate should be centered on two main questions: will the new charter school promote the goal of a thorough and efficient public education, and will the benefits to taxpayers of this new charter school outweigh the detrimental financial impact on schools in the three districts?
One powerful impetus behind the charter school movement is to provide an alternative to existing district schools when public schools are failing –– when they have been unable to provide for the constitutionally mandated thorough and efficient education to which New Jersey children are entitled. PIACS wasn’t established for this purpose — all three of the affected districts offer unquestionably thorough and outstanding educational programs.
As for WW-P, as our mission statement indicates, we believe an education is more than simply whether a child takes “AP” or “IB” classes and how many languages the child can speak fluently. WW-P believes in providing a thorough, well-rounded education to every child both inside and outside of the classroom.
One of the most important benchmarks for a 21st-century education is the ability to deal with cultural diversity. In that regard, WW-P is second to none in the world in exposing children to cultural diversity. WW-P students represent all major racial and cultural groups (52 percent Asian, 38 percent White, 5 percent African-American, and 5 percent Hispanic), and our students speak 33 languages. We take pride in our diversity and its benefits for our student.
We also provide students opportunities in extracurricular activities in both academic and non-academic areas that few other schools can match. We can afford to offer those opportunities due to our size and budgeting discipline. The results speak for themselves: we have two national championships in the Science Olympiad, two individual champions in MathCounts and Word Power, track athletes who have set national records, and numerous other academic and athletic triumphs. We do all this with a per-pupil cost that is $1,300 below the state average and at a lower per-pupil cost than seven of nine districts in Mercer County.
PIACS does offer, with its narrowly focused educational program, something that public schools don’t currently offer. In the context of current tight budgets and funding cutbacks, though, a school targeted so narrowly strikes us as an expensive luxury — a nice-to-have rather than a need-to-have. Heaven help public schools if New Jersey decides to approve more of these specialty schools for our area; eventually the destructive combination of state funding cutbacks, along with dictates to fund novel, special interest programs, will destroy successful public school districts.
There can be no doubt about the detrimental financial impact of the new charter school. The new school will cause considerable financial damage to the taxpayers of all three affected districts, including WW-P.
Some have made claims that the new charter school will simply funnel money from one district to a new school and won’t cost taxpayers an extra dime. If one accepts that argument then both the prior Corzine and current Christie administrations waste their time trying to consolidate school districts and townships around the state to achieve greater economies. The claim that withdrawing one percent of children randomly from a school district will allow the district to reduce costs by one percent defies logic.
No reasonable person could conclude that losing students from among dozens of classes among dozens of different schools can be easily offset by staff reductions or other economies. Indeed, the economies of scale found in consolidation and regionalization (that regional districts such as WW-P exemplify) are clearly undone by splitting off charter schools. This charter school, by duplicating existing services, will add another public entity whose functions are already being fulfilled; this is antithetical to the move toward consolidation. Further serious, costly inefficiencies and fragmentation will result from bussing students across a large geographic area to the charter school.
In a March 11 letter to the WW-P School District, the state places our responsibility for the new charter school at $862,065 for 75 students, or about $11,490 per student. This is higher than the cost of educating a child in K-2 grades in the WW-P district. This is money the taxpayers of West Windsor and Plainsboro will be paying for a school over which they have no control. This demand to fund the charter school comes in the context of a loss of $10 million in state aid over the last two months.
Incidentally, this is not the first charter school to affect West Windsor recently. In January 2008, the state directed us to begin sending, in installments, $787,092 to the new Mercer Arts Charter School for the 73 students who, by the state’s calculations, would be attending that school from WW-P. The school closed within its first year of operation, and the eight students who enrolled from WW-P returned to the district. In the meantime the district was forced by the state to pay Mercer Arts Charter School more than $60,000 that was never recovered.
The Princeton International Academy Charter School cannot be justified as an alternative to existing public schools on the grounds that public schools are failing to provide a thorough and efficient education for our students, and the financial harm to the three districts targeted by the charter greatly outweighs the benefit to taxpayers in the three towns. Perhaps in times of more abundance, an abstract philosophical justification for this charter might be more persuasive.
In this specific instance, expedited approval of a charter school was granted by a state education department that is simultaneously, and contradictorily, demanding that school districts economize by consolidating, regionalizing, and sharing services. New Jersey is penalizing successful districts by carving out niche schools when the benefits of such schools to the public at large have not been clearly demonstrated. The decision by the state to approve the Princeton International Charter School, especially in an expedited way, poorly serves the taxpayers of our communities both economically and educationally.
Hemant Marathe, President
Robert Johnson, Vice President
WW-P Regional Board of Education
The opinions expressed are those of the writers.
