The Long Wait for A.C. Redshaw Elementary School

On the first full day of the 2011-12 school year at the A.C. Redshaw School, uniform-clad students threw their hands into the air to answer questions, colored pictures, learned how to use computers and socialized with their new teachers, all inside of the Jersey Avenue school.

From the exterior, save for a single sign outside the cavernous warehouse that houses Redshaw, you'd never know a school was there.

And it isn't supposed to be there.

Redshaw has being housed in the Jersey Avenue "swing space," two warehouses that were rented by the state to house during construction time, for nearly seven years.

The original plan between the district and the state was to transition schools in and out of the two 100,000-square-foot warehouses while renovations, repairs and, in Redshaw's case, total reconstruction were done at the school buildings.

Redshaw was supposed to be in the space for no more than three years, said principal Vikki Abdus-Salaam.

The fifth-grade class that graduated from Redshaw in June was the first class to have its entire elementary school career in the swing space, Abdus-Salaam said.

"We're doing the best we can under the circumstances, but I feel that our students, they deserve better," she said.

The Original Plan

Back in July 2008, the state’s construction plans for the New Brunswick school district seemed pretty clear.

Once the new high school was completed, the city had three more projects on the state’s drawing board. Paul Robeson elementary school would get a $30.9 million addition and renovation, Redshaw would be knocked down and replaced with a new $44.3 million building and the city’s kindergarten and pre-K programs would get a new $46 million early-childhood education center.

At least, that’s what the 2008 capital plan for the New Jersey School Development Authority (SDA) said. But three years later, a shovel has yet to hit the ground on any of those projects, as SDA construction stalled immediately after Redshaw School was demolished to make room for the new replacement school.

In fact, the future for two of them–the Robeson addition and the kindergarten center–is in doubt after they were left off the SDA’s new construction priority list, which was unveiled by Gov. Chris Christie back in February. The proposed new Redshaw school made the governor’s list, but state officials aren’t saying when construction might start.

New Brunswick’s Redshaw project--like most of the others on the state’s list–is undergoing a review and possible revisions to make sure its design plans comply with one of the SDA’s new goals, the standardization of construction to save money.

“The SDA and DOE (Department of Education) are participating in working group meetings with the districts to determine the best approach and scope to address these projects,’’ said SDA spokeswoman Edythe Maier. “Many of these projects were planned many years ago and demographics may have changed.’’

“We are unable to provide details as to what specific building spaces will be included in the final school designs at this time,’’ Maier said.

The SDA already has spent more than $6.3 million in preliminary costs on Redshaw, the Robeson addition and the kindergarten center.

The Long Wait for Redshaw

Redshaw teacher Lynell Burgos said the biggest impact on Redshaw's long-term relocation has been on the sense of community.

Formerly located in a neighborhood, where students and parents were able to walk to school daily, the school is located on an industrial corridor that is not easily accessible by pedestrians.

Assemblies and programs are still held at the school, but early-arrival and after-school programs are made that much more difficult when the parental population of the school lacks vehicles to drop off or pick up their children without busing, Burgos said.

Additionally, the school had used the New Brunswick Free Public Library as part of its curriculum, because it is two blocks from the former site of the school. Walking trips to the downtown area also have ended, Burgos said.

"For them to go to the theater, downtown, that's a big deal for them," she said. "They've never been, our kids need all these experiences...We really can't walk anywhere around here, it's all factories."

New Brunswick Schools Superintendent Richard Kaplan has no interest in waiting further on Redshaw's reconstruction.

"If a local school superintendent anywhere went to his board and said 'Look, we need a new school,' sold the community on a new school, and said 'We have the money to do this,' tore the school down and then said 'Oops, we've got a problem,' certainly under the Christie administration and their tenure of how they conduct themselves, I guarantee you that superintendent would be canned, his pension would be held, and he might go to jail," Kaplan said, in an interview with New Brunswick Patch.

Over the summer, two meetings were held between the district and SDA officials in which positive, constructive discussion took place, Kaplan said.

A third meeting was canceled by the state, and never rescheduled, he said

Statewide, the agency has spent more than $250 million on projects that have yet to start construction, including more than $175 million on projects that didn’t make the recent list of 10, according to SDA records and local education officials.

In several cities, local officials whose projects made it onto the state’s list say they expected more progress after the announcement was made last winter. In many cases, the state did not begin meeting with local officials about designing the projects until July.

“I’m not convinced that any of these projects are going to go forward,’’ said David Sciarra, executive director of the Newark-based Education Law Center, the group that brought the original lawsuit that forced the state to take on the responsibility of building schools in low-income districts.

“There’s no definite schedule or budget for any of them,’’ continued Sciarra. “I don’t see any evidence other than these make-work meetings that anything is happening.’’

The troubles with the state’s school construction program go back almost to its inception in 1998, when it was created to comply with a Supreme Court ruling mandating equitable education funding for New Jersey’s urban areas.

Plagued by allegations of mismanagement, wasteful spending, and cozy contracts, the program has gone through many changes in 13 years. It originally was run by the state’s Economic Development Authority, then by the School Construction Corporation, and finally by the SDA, which was created in 2007.

Despite the problems, the state has funded more than $8 billion in local school projects in the past 13 years.

The DEVCO Denoument

New Brunswick is no stranger to new construction. Last year, the district opened the doors to a $185 million, brand-new 400,000-square-foot high school on Somerset Street. The district's former high school on Livingston Avenue was made into a middle school.

According to Kaplan, the high school finished six months early and came in $5 million under budget.

The state did not oversee construction on that building. DEVCO did.

New Brunswick Development Corporation, or DEVCO was selected by the state to design and construct the high school as one of six "demonstration projects" in New Jersey.

The demonstration projects were funded by $2.9 billion from the state, set aside in 2008, for the purpose of school construction in Abbott districts.

According to Kaplan, that model worked extraordinarily well, and he would like to see it again.

Kaplan said he has been open with the state in inviting them to go over district numbers, or set up shop right in central office to keep an eye on the project.

"I'll give them an office right on my floor next to the finance office, they can check every purchase order they want," he said.

"Give it to us through DEVCO to oversee the project and we'll get it done," he said. "Obviously the (state) had a lot of faith in DEVCO building our high school. Why can't they build Redshaw?"

Christie is now the sixth governor to try to get the school construction program on track. Soon after taking office, Christie decided the SDA was badly in need of reform and imposed a freeze on all new school construction projects for the state’s “special-needs” urban districts. During that time, emergency repairs on schools continued and so did work on schools in the so-called “regular operating” districts, for which the state pays only part of the costs.

In February, Christie announced he would bring greater accountability and more responsible planning to the SDA. He scrapped the capital plan list of 52 projects and replaced it with his own priority list of 10, which he said was put together using objective criteria.

Each year, Christie said, the SDA would identify a new list of priority projects.

“We all know that the prior program was associated with the absolute worst kind of government waste, mismanagement and lack of supervision, where much was promised, too much was spent, but too little was returned,” Christie said in his announcement.  “I could not responsibly or in good conscience let that history repeat itself at this agency. We will move forward smartly and deliberatively to deliver value to the school districts and to our taxpayers.”

Abdus-Salaam said Redshaw is again on the list of priority projects to be built, but no further information has been provided.

"I am happy to hear that we are on a list, but we have not received any other information," she said.

Kaplan said a new list of projects means nothing if the prior list was never finished.

"Am I supposed to feel better that I'm on a list that's going nowhere," he said. "Or should I in my career, which is maybe four more years, see something through that this project gets built and these kids get out of a warehouse and into a real school?"

A key aspect of Christie’s plan was a call for standardization in the construction projects, an attempt to eliminate the excesses and expensive changes orders that arose in the past. To meet the standardization guidelines, officials are working to revise the design plans for new schools that had been considered “shovel ready.’’ The result is a delay that will stretch to more than two years for most projects on the priority list.

To critics, the current delays represent the latest manifestation of problems at the SDA.

“The state is spending $47 million on staff and overhead for 300 people who are doing nothing,’’ Sciarra said of the agency. “It’s one of the most egregious examples of waste and abuse of state money in state history.’’

Meanwhile, at Redshaw, the children there have a roof over their heads, colorful classrooms and teachers and administrators who say they are doing the absolute best they can with what they have. And they will continue to wait for their new school, one that has a playground, windows, and is located in their own neighborhood.

"We will do whatever we can do to make the environment welcoming for the children but I think that neighborhood missing element, it just makes it very difficult," Burgos said.