Frustration flares over suburban school funding
Under the state’s budget crisis, it hasn’t been a good year — make that couple of years — for New Jersey’s suburban schools, and the frustrations showed today when top state officials came calling before many of the local leaders.

Acting Education Commissioner Lucille Davy and school construction executive Scott Weiner didn’t mince words before the annual meeting of the Garden State Coalition of Schools, the chief advocacy group for the state’s suburban schools.

Davy described bleak times for the schools in terms of overall funding, and Weiner, transitional chief executive of the embattled Schools Construction Corp., said that program’s prospects remain a work in progress as well.

But the cool words went both ways, as local leaders grumbled in their seats and took exception afterward to ongoing criticism from the Corzine administration and the Legislature about everything from administrative perks to what Davy called the schools’ “runaway spending.”

“The issue is with the broad brush that’s being applied to all of us,” said Marjorie Heller, superintendent of Little Silver schools and the association’s newly-named president. “There are those who really resent the way everyone’s been characterized.”

“It’s really tough times, and we need to get off these side issues,” she said.

It was the Garden State Coalition’s 15th annual meeting since the group was formed to give voice to specifically suburban districts. The group has since grown to a membership of 125 districts, and with full-time executive director Lynne Strickland, it has become one of Trenton’s most active lobbying forces on education issues, especially around funding.

School funding was the first and foremost at today’s breakfast meeting at the Forsgate Country Club in Monroe Township. The vast majority of the districts have seen little or no increases in state funding for five years, while facing new and controversial spending limits.

As the annual meeting wore down, Marlboro Superintendent David Abbott posed a question about school construction that might have applied to his peers’ mood in general: “How do we see through all this fog any light at the end of the tunnel?”

Contributed by John Mooney