Franklin Lakes BOE Adopts 'Short-Term' Solution to Enrollment Issues

Following opposition from parents, the Franklin Lakes Board of Education voted down a plan on Tuesday night to shift incoming kindergarteners from Colonial Road School, a plan that had been devised to address uneven class sizes in the face of budgetary constraints.

Uneven class sizes among the elementary schools has been a longstanding issue in the district. A committee organized under Superintendent Frank Romano shortly after he began his tenure discussed adopting a “modified Princeton system,” which would have established two schools for pre-school through third grade and another for fourth and fifth graders.

“At the elementary level,” Romano recalls of his discussions with residents upon taking the position, “the top issues they presented were inconsistencies and discrepancies in class sizes between schools.”

Proponents of the modified Princeton model say that concentrating students into fewer buildings would even out class sizes, preventing variations in student population between school zones.

But in a 2009 survey on the issue, residents overwhelmingly responded in support of maintaining the current schools; only 17 percent indicated support for altering the structure.

Discussion of the changes was tabled, and beginning last year the district opted instead to shuffle incoming kindergarten students to other schools to keep class sizes under the district guideline of 20 students per kindergarten class.

Parents were given the option to have their children continue in that school or return to their home school the following year, if it could be done while keeping class sizes within the guideline.

“We had a successful experience with it last year,” board member Christine Christopoul said. “We thought we would do it again this year, but we received a lot of pushback from parents that were in the room [at Tuesday night’s meeting].”

Melanie Cervino, the parent of an incoming kindergartener at Colonial Road, organized about a dozen parents, which she said represented most of the incoming kindergarten class, to address the issue before the board.

The policy, Cervino said, “would not only affect the 19 kids at Colonial Road for the kindergarten years, but could possibly affect them for their whole K through five experience. Because when they move on to first grade, if they didn’t get more enrollments, or enough enrollments, they were going to continue shifting students over.”

Among the concerns that the parents expressed were that transitions between schools might be disruptive in the social and educational experience of children, splitting up siblings, and a lack of guarantees that they would be able to either continue their children through the new school or return to their home school for first grade.

During a more than four-hour meeting Tuesday night, the board voted to table the changes and maintain 45 sections in the elementary schools, adding one kindergarten class to each school.

Christopoul said that she had hoped that, since the sections need not have been finalized until the summer, the board would continue the discussion to try and find alternatives to maintain class sizes under the guidelines without adding new classes.

“It was 12:30 at night, and we really dove into that without having had a tremendous amount of discussion as to what the other alternatives are,” she said. “I wanted more time to look at it."

After the issue was tabled, Romano urged the board to vote on a resolution on a number of sections, arguing that keeping the number unknown until the next meeting could disrupt the district’s planning.

“You can table a resolution, but you can’t table or halt operations,” he told the board on Tuesday night.

A resolution to maintain the 45 sections was adopted, with Christopoul the lone dissenting vote. She said that though her immediate concern in voting no Tuesday was to gain more information before proceeding, she believes that seven kindergarten sections in the district is financially “unsustainable.”

Romano estimated that each section costs the district about $65,000-70,000.

“As a parent, I think it’s nice to have the small class sizes, and I definitely heard what the parents in the room were saying,” Christopoul said. “I don’t disagree with what they were saying in terms of advocating for their kids, but if I look at the other people in the district, I just don’t think it was a fiscally responsible decision to make.”

The decision, Romano said, is only a short-term solution, and the district will eventually need to address the underlying issues with changes in the way students are enrolled in the schools.

In a letter to parents Wednesday, Romano wrote: “This resolution and the related conversation indicated a commitment to shorter-term solutions that may not be financially sustainable but are justified in the interim and balanced by a commitment to finding longer-term solutions that will continue to serve the children well.”