Brick School Board Delays Decision On Beloved Principal's Transfer

Brick, NJ -- At a time when most of her peers were likely getting ready for bed, Chatham Courter stepped to the microphone.

"Last year I wanted to start a book club," the 10-year-old Midstreams Elementary School student told the Brick Township Board of Education and the audience at the school board meeting Thursday evening. "Dr. Billen helped me do that."

"He made me feel like I can do anything, I can do whatever I set my mind to," Courter said as she asked the board to reject the district's proposed transfer of John Billen, the principal at Midstreams, to Veterans Memorial Elementary School.

"I have friends at Midstreams and they deserve to feel the way I do," Courter said.

Courter was one of several people who spoke Thursday evening, imploring the board to leave Billen at Midstreams, where he has been principal for four years and has, according to parents and staff, created a thriving, vibrant school community. About 60 people turned out to show their support for keeping Billen at Midstreams, many clad in Midstreams-related T-shirts.

The board, at the behest of president John Lamela, tabled action on the proposed transfer of Billen to Veterans Memorial Elementary School and the additional action of moving Colleen Kerr, currently the assistant principal at Veterans Memorial Elementary School, to Midstreams, "so we can take a closer look," he said.

In the hallway outside the auditorium at Brick High School after the meeting, Billen hugged a number of the parents and students who turned out and thanked them for speaking out.

Thomas Gialanella, the interim superintendent, said his recommendations to move Billen to Veterans Memorial Elementary School and Kerr to Midstreams were "not made in a vacuum."

"I tried to get to know as many people as I could," said Gialanella, who became the interim superintendent in early February. "I look at what is best for the district as a whole."

Gialanella said he felt Billen and Kerr would both benefit from the new challenges that running different schools would offer.

"I understand that Dr. Billen is a popular administrator," Gialanella said. "I stepped back and looked at the whole district and what is best for the district."

That frustrated some in the audience.

Moving both Billen and Kerr is "disrupting two schools and two sets of students," said Janet Kelly, who started a petition to ask the board to keep Billen at Midstreams. "If Mrs. Kerr stays at Vets she's already familiar with the ins and outs of her school. Why put two administrators in the position of starting from scratch?"

"Stop playing chess with our administrators," said Francine Banick, a member of the Midstreams PTO and the PTO's liaison to the district. "I can appreciate your interest in taking an accomplished administrator and moving him to another school in the district as a business decision ... but what message are we sending if we do our jobs really well and we get everything ripped out from under us?"

"I'm not sure why Mrs. Kerr isn't being moved up to principal at Vets," said one Midstreams parent, an aide in the district who noted she has been moved three times in three years. "Mrs. Kerr, you have done a wonderful job."

Banick and several others pointed to Midstreams' strong state test scores and said Billen is the reason for those scores, particularly the literacy scores.

"My kids hated reading," said Sandie Caetano, who told the board she withdrew her children from private school to enroll them at Midstreams because she was so impressed with what she had heard and seen from her daughters' peers.

But they completed the 20 minutes of reading nightly -- a requirement Billen instituted -- and even made it a point to read more, just because they wanted to please the principal, she said.

"It was 20 minutes a night minimum," Caetano said after the meeting. The girls' reading skills were below grade level when they enrolled at Midstreams and the required reading was torture at first, she said.

"Now I can't get them to put a book down," she said. "They brought books with them tonight to the meeting."

Terry Malone Corino, a retired speech therapist who worked for Billen, said the principal genuinely cares about his students, his staff and their families. In the wake of Superstorm Sandy, Billen helped organize a donation effort to assist families in the school that had suffered damage to their homes. When family emergencies arose, he was always understanding, she said.

"In my district, a school like Midstreams and a leader like Dr. Billen are purely mythical," said William Sorrentino, a Midstreams parent who is an elementary school librarian in the Lakewood school district.

Former board member Larry Reid said the board is in a difficult spot, and said it had lost talented administrators in the past due to a failure to give them promotions or challenges -- an indirect reference to Gialanella, who left the Brick schools after he was passed over for the superintendent's job years ago.

But Banick said the transfer of Billen to Veterans Memorial Elementary School was not a promotion but a lateral transfer, from one elementary school to another.

"You should learn from our school not dissect it," Banick said.

(A parent looks over her shoulder toward Midstreams principal John Billen as parents speak to the Brick Board of Education Thursday evening. Karen Wall photo)