Let the school merger fight begin

Legislative panel to begin hearing far-reaching proposals for county consolidation
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
BY JOHN MOONEY AND DUNSTAN McNICHOL
Star-Ledger Staff

State lawmakers will begin discussing a series of proposals today to establish 21 countywide school offices that would oversee virtually every function of public education, a change proponents say will save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

The offices, each controlled by a single superintendent and four- member county board, would replace hundreds of local superintendents and central office staff.

Specficially, the bills proposed by state Sen. Bob Smith (D-Middlesex) would ask voters in each county to decide whether to replace the current system of locally administered districts with the county office. The county superintendents, appointed by the governor, would oversee everything from teacher hiring to salary negotiations to curriculum.

Local school boards would still be elected, but their function would become merely advisory.

"How can anyone say 618 districts is an efficient way to deliver services? This is one way to take control of it," Smith said yesterday.

Smith's bills -- along with two less sweeping proposals -- will be discussed by a committee seeking ways to reduce New Jersey's rising property taxes. Committee members are expected to get an earful from the powerful education lobby.

"We've advised every member of the committee to wear Kevlar vests," said Smith, co-chairman of the special legislative committee reviewing consolidation. "We ex pect an awful lot of pushback."

The committee's effort is part of a broader push by lawmakers to find ways to reduce New Jersey's property taxes, which are the highest in the nation and driven in large measure by ballooning school budgets.

Eliminating hundreds of superintendent positions and other top administrators could save an esti mated $553 million in local costs, according to a state auditor esti mate included in one of Smith's bills.

"All the administrative overhead -- the local superintendent, the local business administrator, even the local lawyer -- they'd all be gone," Smith said.

School officials and lobbyists who were invited to testify on the proposals were expressing reservations.

Frank Belluscio, spokesman for the New Jersey School Boards Association, said such a proposal would not result in significant sav ings. And, he said, it's unlikely vot ers will embrace such a bureaucracy.

"Citizens like their school boards closer to their locality," Belluscio said. "Placing education in the hands of a large bureaucracy like the county only removes it from the locality."

Smith said that even under his proposals, local districts would re tain their identity, with students staying in their schools with the same principals and faculty. And, he said, voters would make the ultimate decision on establishing the new system.

"There are no losers," he said. "Nothing changes in the actual costs of the schools, just the administration, with the economies of scale, better contracts."

The hearing, at 10 a.m. in the Statehouse annex building in Tren ton, comes as a poll released yesterday shows support for such mergers as a way of easing property taxes.

Of the 803 New Jersey residents questioned by the Monmouth University Polling Institute, 56 percent said they would be willing to see their local school district merge with another to reduce costs. Only one other proposal -- having the state collect and distribute property taxes rather than collecting them town-by-town -- won majority support.

By contrast, only 31 percent of those polled were willing to pay a higher income tax to fund schools; 37 percent were willing to accept a higher sales tax, and 28 percent supported cutting extracurricular programs in their districts as a way to reduce property taxes.

"Home rule is at its weakest point in public support that I've ever seen it," said Patrick Murray, director of the polling institute, which conducted the poll on behalf of the Association for Children of New Jersey. "There's a lot of senti ment that there are too many administrators."

Other educators were skeptical about the consolidation measures. Several groups called them radical measures unlikely to yield much in the way of savings and said they go too far in usurping local districts.

"Upon first reading, they're extreme," said Lynne Strickland, di rector of the Garden State Coalition of Schools, an organization of suburban districts.

And one activist, David Sciarra of the Education Law Center in Newark, said the bills need to address how to break up the concen trations of poor children now clumped in urban districts.

A third bill, sponsored by Assembly Speaker Joseph Roberts (D-Camden), would install executive superintendents in each county, with authority to monitor local spending, veto local budget items, manage local district business and transportation functions and order votes on district consolidation.

The fourth proposal, sponsored by Sen. Joseph Kyrillos (R-Mon mouth) would regionalize some local administrative functions.

"The state's at a tipping point," Kyrillos said. "We have to do dramatic things to get our footing, to keep the state a successful state."