By Terminating Agreement With Cranbury, District Can Achieve 7 Percent Reduction in Enrollment
To the Editor:
The facilities referendum that calls for spending $137M on a new 5/6 school, PHS expansion, and various other upgrades will have a huge financial impact on our town decades after the current School Board members’ term expires. The need for this spending is driven by the projected increase in student enrollment. According to the third-party consultant retained by the district, enrollment is estimated to grow about 10 percent (with a 5 percent standard error) by 2022.
What if we have an opportunity to reduce that enrollment growth to only 3 percent (±5 percent) by 2022? Will that change the need, or at least the timing of the need to spend? $137M amounts to almost a year and half of the school district’s budget, definitely not a small number. For every year this $137M spending is postponed, the district would effectively put $5 million back into residents’ pocket.
Under the existing send-and-receive agreement, our district educates 280 high school students from Cranbury, or 18 percent of PHS enrollment. By terminating the agreement with Cranbury, the district can achieve an immediate 7 percent reduction in enrollment. This agreement is scheduled to expire in June 2020. The school district owes residents a detailed explanation as to why extending this agreement is still in our best interest. To justify an extension by only focusing on the $4.8 million we receive but not the corresponding costs of serving the Cranbury students makes no sense. It is disappointing that the district told us that any cost reduction from terminating the Cranbury agreement will be minimal because there are on average only 3-4 Cranbury students in each of the high school’s 85 classes. This picture of averaging is misleading and far from the reality. I urge our elected officials to make smart and pragmatic decisions on our behalf rather than take the path of least resistance.
Jian Chen
Ettl Farm