Empty seats are costing high school district taxpayers big bucks

On Jan. 28 the Freehold Regional High School District Board of Education, with the approval of Superintendent of Schools Jim Wasser, dismissed, with no more than a cursory review, the recommendations of its own Student Attendance Advisory Committee (on redistricting).

The board, by a vote of 5.2 to 2.3 points, thereby ensured that, based on the board demographer’s calculations, 600 student spaces in under-capacity regional high schools for the school year starting in September 2002 will lie vacant and fallow.

Six hundred spaces that were bought and paid for by taxpayers when the December 1999, $69 million new high school building addition referendum was passed.

Six hundred spaces that the taxpayers of the district were told were absolutely necessary be-cause three of the existing regional high schools, including the two in Marlboro and Manalapan, were over capacity.

Six hundred spaces that the board and the superintendent now say won’t be filled next fall because seven or eight months just isn’t enough notice to Marl-boro and Manalapan parents who claim their children are so frail that to change the high schools some of them would otherwise have to attend starting the next school year would cause them to curl up and die from shock.

Meanwhile, children from Freehold Township and Howell continue to be redistricted all the time to alleviate overcrowding in the regional district’s high schools so as to avoid unnecessary and costly additional school construction costs.

What is the value of those 600 empty space? When the above referendum was passed, the board and the superintendent told taxpayers that it would provide critically needed additional space for approximately 1,800 students. That was the overriding purpose of the referendum — $69 million for 1,800 spaces.

So, what are 600 empty spaces worth? $23 million. That’s right, $23 million worth of spaces bought and paid for by the taxpayers of the district — $23 million worth of empty spaces that will lie vacant next year.

And the mayor of Marlboro is now looking into having yet another addition built onto Marl-boro High School, to be paid for by all of the taxpayers of the Freehold Regional High School District.

$23 million. That’s the value of 600 empty spaces. Only $38,833.33 for each space. Enron couldn’t have done a better management job.

Barry Fulmer

Freehold Township

Member

Freehold Regional

High School District

Facilities Advisory Committee