West Deptford Backs out of School Choice

Despite the stated reservations of its Superintendent, the West Deptford Board of Education (BOE) voted 5-3 to withdraw its application for the New Jersey School Choice program at its July 2013 meeting.

The move puts West Deptford in the minority of school districts in Gloucester County that have already signed on to the program, or, like West Deptford, that had planned to enter it in 2014-15, Superintendent Kevin Kitchenman said at the June BOE meeting.

Without additional funds provided by adding to the district rolls the 40 or so high school students that the program could provide, Kitchenman said, West Deptford will be hard-pressed to find another source of revenue to offset declining ratables in the township. 

In earlier discussions, Kitchenman had ballparked the net financial impact of adding the additional students at $200,000, with a $400,000 projected increase in revenues mitigated by the cost of hiring new staff to accommodate them.

“I think that withdrawing the application was a financial mistake, but the Board felt that other concerns outweighed the financial impact,” Kitchenman said by e-mail last week.

“[The Board] would like us to still consider it for the 2015-16 school year, with modifications yet to be determined,” he said.

Communication and culture change

Board member David Kline, who voted against participation in the school choice program, said he is interested in the BOE taking another look at the proposal for next year.

Kline said West Deptford’s application needs a more refined focus before the district opens its doors to non-resident students.

“I wasn’t strongly opposed to it; I just wasn’t yet comfortable with what the offering was, what it meant to the schools,” Kline said. “I [also] think we need to make sure to take the time to communicate it to the community properly.”

Despite the discussion having been open to the public for a few months at BOE meetings, and supported by information posted on the district website, Kline said that he didn’t feel like the Board has its finger on the public pulse of the issue.

“We were a little bit late getting information out to the school website and out to the press,” he said. “I don’t think we did the best job communicating it to everybody.”

“I’d really like to have a discussion where people come and talk to us about it,” Kline said. “I don’t know that that will happen, but I’d love to see it happen.

“On top of that, I’d just like to do some more research and see what it is we’re getting into and really have a plan for how to execute.”

Kline also said that the district has plenty on its plate trying to implement new curriculum and state initiatives and identify the source of declining test scores.

Adding more students who could adversely affect those numbers in an age of quantitative results would be too great of a risk to take blindly, he said.

“What I hear from the administration is that we have an at-risk population that we have to reach out to,” Kline said. “To me, that money wasn’t worth possibly adding more at-risk students.”

BOE President Chris Strano was not present at the meeting, but affirmed the position taken by the Board as the right move for the present.

Strano disagreed with Kline’s take that the community hadn’t had a chance to examine the question, but added that bringing in new kids can be “an emotional issue” with unintended consequences.

“My personal view is that it takes away a little bit of the community part of it because you should have school in your community,” Strano said. “If you don’t like the schools, you should move.

“I look at these things and say maybe it’s not an emotional issue,” he continued, “but if it did come down and affect someone, you’d hear about it.

Strano, who described himself as “a big believer in a school system as the center of your community,” said that people without children in the district would probably support anything that would lower their taxes, but cautioned that the issue “affects more families than anything else.

“I look at it as a political way for people saying, ‘if you don’t like the school where you live, go someplace else’,” he said. 

Strano also upheld Kline’s assessment that the current school administration has a lot of pressure “to right the ship” before adding “something else on that might net us a small margin of financial [gain].

“[School choice] was never presented as a scalable thing,” Strano said. “As soon as you open it up with freshmen, you make a four-year commitment. We’re not a huge, regional school. Adding 40 kids is adding 4 percent of the population now.”

‘We have to look for creative opportunities’

Board member Peter Guzzetti, who along with Dr. Brian Gotchel and Lisa Eckley voted with the minority to push ahead with the school choice application, said that financial concerns should have trumped everything else for the board.

“With our declining ratables, if we don't leverage these type of programs, we have only two choices: cut programs or raise taxes,” Guzzetti told Patch via e-mail.

“School choice appears to be one way of avoiding those undesirable options,” he said, “so I commend the administration for bringing these type of ideas forward, and would encourage them to continue to do so.”

Guzzetti said that whether school choice is something that Board members want to see or don’t, “the fact is it's here, it's being encouraged at the state level, and many local districts are participating.

“We are already losing the state aid associated with residents that choose to participate,” Guzzetti said. “If we don't participate as a district, that revenue loss is a one-way street.”

“It's not unlike free-market principles in the economy,” he added. “If you choose isolationism and protectionism, generally you lose. Especially in this case, where we have no control of the outflow: dollars leave when residents choose the open market, and we've chosen to not allow any dollars flow in our favor.” 

‘We need a clear understanding of what we are’

Kline agreed that the financial question is one that won’t be resolved easily, and said that the Board will be looking into every opportunity to leverage any cost savings it sees.

“I know that we’ve gotten some significant savings this year alone in breakage that we weren’t counting on; retirements, things like that,” Kline said. “So $200,000 out of that budget number, we’ll have to look at that.”

Ultimately, he said, if West Deptford is going to participate in school choice, the district should focus its efforts on creating a clear vision for what it wants its program to achieve, and market it based on that plan.

He and Strano both pointed to the district as a place with a strong focus on technology, including its 1:1 laptop initiative, athletics, performing arts and advanced placement courses, which contribute to students’ college credits.

“I think we need to have the program defined and the process defined so that when we open registration, we have a real clear understanding of what it is we’re trying to say we are,” Kline said.