Seaside Park Seeking Approval To Send Elementary Students To Lavallette

The Seaside Park Board of Education is seeking state approval to send its elementary students to Lavallette Elementary School -- a move the Toms River Regional Board of Education is not opposing.

Seaside Park’s petition was announced at the Toms River school board meeting Tuesday night, according to the board meeting agenda. Public comment on the petition is being accepted by the state Department of Education through June 8.

Seaside Park has been sending its elementary students to Toms River since it closed the borough’s elementary school in 2010. This year, 27 students are covered under that agreement, according to Seaside Park’s tentative budget for the 2015-16 school year.

But several Seaside Park students already are attending Lavallette -- a K-8 school -- with their parents paying tuition for them to do so.

The Seaside Park Board of Education voted on March 9 to seek a second sending-receiving agreement with Lavallette, citing concerns about the continuity of education. If that agreement is approved by the state commissioner of education, Seaside Park taxpayers would then pay for the borough’s students to attend either Toms River schools or Lavallette, depending on the parents’ choice.

To make the vote possible, the Seaside Park board had to invoke the doctrine of necessity -- which gives a public body the power to act despite conflicts of interest. Four of its board members -- Charles Appleby, Gina Condos, Ronald Neal and Gary Yedman -- currently pay tuition for their children to attend Lavallette Elementary School. The fifth board member, Norma DeNoia, is an assistant principal at Toms River High School East.

The tentative 2015-2016 budget approved by the Seaside Park school board estimates the district would be paying to send 36 students out of district, at a cost of $476,995, about $10,000 less than the amount it is paying this year, according to that tentative budget document. The total budgeted amount, including transportation, is $799,841, about $8,000 less than the current year’s budget.

Why Toms River has chosen not to oppose the Seaside Park elementary school petition was not immediately known.

At the middle and high school level, Seaside Park is part of the Central Regional School District, a tie it has been seeking to sever for a number of years, because of the tax burden that falls on the borough’s taxpayers.

Parents have complained additionally about the distance from Seaside Park to Central Regional, which they say results in students being on a school bus for 45 minutes.

From September 2009 until this school year, those students had been attending Toms River schools for middle and high school. Initially those students did so at no cost to the parents, under an arrangement set up by former Superintendent Michael J. Ritacco. The tuition-free arrangement ended at the start of the 2011-12 school year, but the Toms River district has wrangled both with Central Regional and with Seaside Park parents over who would pay the tuition. Central Regional refused, as its board never agreed to a send-receive arrangement. Toms River dropped its claim against Central last fall.

In 2008, former Ocean County Schools Superintendent Bruce Greenfield recommended that Seaside Park align itself with a K-12 district. Central Regional accepts grades 7-12.

“If you are looking at education, you have to go to a K-12,” Robert Martucci, borough administrator in Seaside Park, told the Patch in June 2011. “It has nothing to do with politics. It has to do with what’s right and what’s wrong. Eventually every Seaside Park child will be in Toms River.”

Lavallette students go to Point Pleasant Beach High School for ninth through 12th grades, so Seaside Park students who attend Lavallette would have to go to Central Regional for high school, unless their parents chose to pay tuition for them to attend high school elsewhere. The distance to Point Pleasant Beach High School from Seaside Park is a 30-minute drive according to Google Maps.The drive time from Seaside Park to Central Regional is 23 minutes, according to Google Maps. Both time estimates are based on a car driving from point to point and do not account for added time due to school bus stops to pick up or discharge passengers.

Seaside Park has been a sending district of the Central Regional school district since Central Regional was formed in 1954. Prior to that, Seaside Park students went to Toms River schools. But the Toms River district grew so quickly, there was no longer any room for Seaside Park students, so they ended up going to Central Regional.

Seaside Park paid Central Regional through the “turnstile” method, or per capita, until 1976, just like the other four towns in the district.

But things changed in 1976, after the state Legislature changed the tuition payment method for regional school districts from head counts to a formula based on an individual town’s property values. The tuition payment change was gradually phased in over a five-period.

Seaside Park filed suit against Central Regional in 2007, claiming that the tuition method was unconstitutional. But a judge later ruled against Seaside Park and dismissed the case. Thirteen individual Seaside Park residents appealed the ruling in October 2010. The matter is still pending. The borough, along with Island Heights, has sought dissolution of the regional district. A petition on that was denied by the state Department of Education in December 2013.