Vote NO on January 25!

On January 25 Hoboken voters should say no to the plan to raise taxes and waste hundreds of millions of dollars on a sports center with a high school attached. The proponents of the plan (being presented at meetings during the Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Year’s vortex), the Board of Education and the school administration, have been dishonest with the public from day one. Their dishonesty should not be rewarded, nor should Hoboken be saddled with another mostly empty school building such as the current high school.

The Board of Education and school administration have repeatedly engaged in number games. They have juked the stats to pretend a historic enrollment increase exists by cherry picking the year with the largest dip in enrollment and then averaging that with current enrollment. If they had used the year prior or after their chosen year the variation would have been within the historic norm. Furthermore, they have ignored the consistent grade group size decline which results in roughly 1/3 as many students in high school as were in kindergarten together.

They have presented, on the BOE website, a flipbook with graphs covering 30 years adjacent to supposedly summarizing analysis containing falsehoods that are not shown in the data set. For example, while the written propaganda adjoining their own chart claims that “District PreK-12 enrollment has increased 127% over the past ten years,” their own chart shows only a 16.667% increase in enrollment over the last 30 years. The written propaganda they provide adjacent to their next chart states that “PreK-5 enrollment has increased 154% in ten years,” when the chart they provide suggests it has risen only approximately 25% from 1990 to 2020.

The BOE number's games don’t only apply to their bold-faced attempts to cook the books and pretend there has been massive enrollment increase in recent years. Rather, in addition to assuming Hoboken voters can’t read graphs, the Board of Education has assumed Hoboken voters are too dumb to know that the current high school has a capacity of 1,500 not the 1,100 they now claim, nor the 829 they claimed in 2001 according to the 2009 Audit Report of the Hoboken School District by the NJ Department of Education. They assume the people of Hoboken don’t know that of the roughly 430 Hoboken High School students, approximately 120 of them come from outside Hoboken through the County School Choice program, and that the high school is a large building with less than 1/3rd of the total student body it can hold.

Moreover, at the Board of Education meeting held Tuesday December 14 Superintendent of Hoboken District Schools, Dr. Christine Johnson, counterfactually asserted that Hoboken’s state education aid is not in danger due to this unnecessary spending spree. While it is true that state funding of education districts formerly known as Abbot is a result of a court case (as Dr. Johnson stated), the amount of aid received is a result of a bureaucratic/political process in part based on local property values. In fact, for the 2021-2022 school year Jersey City (another former Abbot district) lost $71 million in state aid based on the 2018 state aide formula review pushed by Democrats and Republicans. Many in Trenton have constituents who ask why they are funding Hoboken’s early childhood education when Hoboken is known as part of the state's “Gold Coast.” Paying hundreds of millions for a new and unnecessary sports complex with a high school attached will add fuel to the fire for those who would shrink or eliminate aid to Hoboken. Were this to go to litigation, the question for the courts would be - if the Hoboken BOE can afford hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for new construction, is Hoboken still the economically distressed district in need of state aid it once was?

From the top to the bottom, in manipulating the stats to artificially create a non-existent enrollment explosion to willfully ignoring the potential unintended consequences of their actions, the Hoboken Board of Education and the district administration have been dishonest. Hoboken should send a clear message to the board and vote NO on January 25.