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. But 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.

Information on where and how to comment on Seaside Park’s petition can be found in the Toms River announcement, attached to this story as a photo.