I attended the education summitheld June 14th. I have a few notes and thoughts I wanted to share,but I won't go into the nitty gritty details of it all. You can read more at the links above, right (Jason Koestenblatt did a very good job of covering the blow by blow action).
A five-town consolidated K12 makes a lot of sense economically and educationally. The furor has been mostly about who pays more or less (because of the difference in housing values) but an aspect that didn't get enough attention is the educational advantages of a unified K12.
In a nut shell, improved efficiency means funds are spent on quality education instead of wasteful duplication. It makes no sense to have five separate K-8 districts, each with their own teaching methods and curriculum, yet all of them having the exact same goal of preparing students to attend the regional high school district. I also have serious doubts that WT could achieve on its own the quality that exists in the regional district today, which quality is due in no small part to the Superintendent, Dr. Anthony diBattista.
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The other thought that didn't get a lot of attention at the summit was doing something radically different with how schools are funded in NJ. The complaint I heard (several times) at the summit was the 70-80% increase in property tax in the last decade. It's gotten so that retirees are forced to leave the town they lived in for many years. I sometimes wonder, that with taxes so high, whether we actually own our property or if we just rent it from the town. Maybe it's time for a NJ Prop 13 that limits total property taxes to 1% of the value of the property.
Finally, there is a perception that consolidation is some sort of panacea that will somehow arrest the steady rise in property taxes. Ask yourself, that if we had a five-town consolidated K12 district a decade ago, would the property taxes have gone up 70-80% anyway? I think you know that the answer is yes. The problem has more to do with , which is the battle that Governor Christie is fighting in Trenton. Without reforms in the pension and health-care plans, consolidation is but a stop-gap measure. That battle must be won if we hope to see any lasting property tax relief.
