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MONTAGUE -- While the public continues to digest details of an upcoming $3.2 million school bond referendum planned for Sept. 30, questions about the planned bus route for ninth-grade students who will begin attending High Point Regional High School in September appear to have been laid to rest.
By ERIC OBERNAUER
MONTAGUE -- While the public continues to digest details of an upcoming $3.2 million school bond referendum planned for Sept. 30, questions about the planned bus route for ninth-grade students who will begin attending High Point Regional High School in September appear to have been laid to rest.
The newly planned route, as presented at Wednesday’s board meeting, will add about 41/2 miles each way on to the route originally presented to state Department of Education officials last year but will avoid completely the trip over High Point Mountain, which would have entailed a roughly 10-mile climb up Deckertown Turnpike and then rapidly down again as the road turns sharply and makes its steep descent into Wantage.
The new route has none of those steep gradients and instead calls for students to be transported from Montague south along Route 206, then east along Route 636 past Culver Lake, and then northeast on Routes 519 and 628 to High Point High School, which is located just off Route 628 on Pidgeon Hill Road.
Assuming Montague Elementary School as a starting point, the new route to High Point High School has a distance of about 18.5 miles, though actual distances will vary based on students’ specific pickup and dropoff locations.
Board of Education President Beverly Borrego acknowledged Wednesday that the new, longer route was fashioned in deference to the safety concerns some parents had previously raised regarding Deckertown Turnpike -- particularly in regard to icy road conditions in winter.
Even with the added distance, the new route is about the same as the 18.5-mile distance from Montague Elementary School to Sussex County Technical School, where about 75 Montague students in grades 9-12 were enrolled during this past school year. The new route is also slightly shorter than the approximately 18.75-mile distance from Montague Elementary School to the Sussex County Charter School for Technology, which about 54 Montague students in grades 6-8 attended this past school year.
A more reasonable approach
While the ink is now dry on Montague’s send-receive agreement with High Point Regional High School, the future home of the township’s students in grades 7-8 remains to be determined even as Montague remains committed to phasing out its longstanding arrangement of sending students in grades 7-12 across state lines to public schools in Port Jervis, N.Y.
Montague school officials hope to resolve the uncertainty once and for all by securing voter approval of a proposed addition to the existing elementary school on Sept. 30.
The proposed school addition, which the board voted 4-2 Wednesday to put to a referendum, represents a nearly $10 million cost reduction from the $13 million plan that failed by a 702-320 vote in January.
The cost of the new plan, for Montague taxpayers, would be further reduced by having the state kick in aid equal to 24 percent of the principal and interest on the bonds. Practically speaking, the aid -- which the state has already approved -- would reduce the plan’s cost from $3.2 million to $2.4 million.
The downsized plan is the result of a reconfiguration of the original plan that was made possible by designating the added space part of a K-8 school rather than a middle school.
Charlie Teufert, a former Montague school board member and current trustee of the Sussex County Charter School for Technology, elaborated Wednesday on the distinctions that the Department of Education makes between a K-8 and a middle school and recounted a tour he conducted of the charter school facilities earlier this year for Montague school officials.
“I think that visit was enlightening for everyone,” Teufert said. “By making it a K-8 plan, the requirements are much less, so we didn’t need to have a bigger gymnasium, we didn’t need a bigger cafeteria, we didn’t need a full-fledged science lab with dangerous gases and protective equipment, and the library didn’t have to be expanded. ... There were a lot of reasons it was a $13 million project, but coming down to a $3.2 million project, that’s reasonable.”
Under the newly configured K-8 plan, school officials are proposing to add two new classrooms and a general science room to the K-6 Montague Elementary School. The plan also proposes the relocation of two existing classrooms to allow space for locker rooms, all of which would be done so the school could accommodate about 40 students in grades 7-8.
The original plan in January, as alluded to by Teufert, had called for constructing four new classrooms and two new science rooms along with an expanded cafeteria, media center and gymnasium.
Tax impact: Real, not speculative, numbers
Lisa Gorab, the bond attorney who advised the board on the financing of both the original and new proposals, said Wednesday that the new plan’s tax impact on the average township home currently assessed at $105,000 would be about $88. For a home currently assessed at $210,000, or twice that amount, the tax impact would be $176, and so forth. Those numbers, she said, are based on a yearly debt service cost that, with state aid, will average out to about $185,000 annually over 20 years.
Gorab, addressing a prior criticism of the proposal in January, said the new proposal’s estimated tax impact is based on the actual cost to service the debt and is not based on factoring in the speculative cost savings of having all K-8 students under one roof.
“There are no operational savings that the district is including in this tax impact,” Gorab said Wednesday. “There will be operational savings, but the district was determined to just present the tax impact to you based on debt service.”
The estimated yearly tax impact under the old plan, even with those assumed savings factored in, had been $173 for a home assessed at $105,000 and $346 for a home assessed at $210,000 -- in other words, more than twice the tax impact under the new plan, which makes no such assumptions.
The assumed savings under the old plan were based on what the board, at the time, had estimated would be an operating cost savings of about $500,000 as a result of housing all K-8 students in one building. The board, however, was unable to guarantee what portion of those savings would be put toward tax relief or toward the yearly debt service in future years and what portion might instead be put toward other programs or toward the hiring of more staff.
With the new bond proposal, that concern appears to have been laid to rest.
Borrego, in a prepared statement Wednesday, also addressed the continuing outflow of tuition payments to Port Jervis as well as to charter and choice schools and Sussex Tech, all of which remain a magnet for large numbers of Montague students opting out of Port Jervis. Unless the trend is reversed, she said, the Montague School District will be unable to survive financially without making deep cuts in staffing and programs at the K-6 levels.
Borrego also touted the educational and curricular stability of having students attend the same school from pre-K through eighth grade and the social benefits of enabling those children to move on to high school together with their existing social networks in place.
Transition committee decisions questioned
Supporters of the building proposal will still have their work cut out for them, however.
When members of the board met for the first time after the previous bond referendum in January, they approved Borrego’s formation of an ad hoc transition committee consisting of herself and board members George Gelderman and Sally Kurtzman. The committee, at the time, was charged with exploring all options for finding a final home for the district’s seventh- and eighth-graders with the understanding that no final action could be taken without full board approval.
Gelderman, in a brief statement Wednesday, said the committee recently met with several individuals, including Mayor George Zitone and former board member Charlie Teufert, all of whom had expressed interest earlier this year in meeting with the board to discuss next steps. Also at that meeting were residents James Rush and Dale Bouma, and two others identified by Gelderman only as “Mr. Mitchell” and “Mr. Roberts” -- individuals whose first names Gelderman said afterward he couldn’t recall.
“As a result of that meeting, the majority of the committee recommended sending the proposal to referendum,” Gelderman said.
Kurtzman, for her part, questioned if the transition committee, of which she is also a member, had fully explored the possibility of sending students in grades seven and eight to another local school district -- in this case, either Sussex-Wantage or Kittatinny Regional -- before deciding to forge ahead with another referendum.
Board member Diane Cole -- who attended the most recent transition committee meeting in place of Kurtzman, who was out of town at the time -- echoed those concerns.
“It seemed like the meeting was basically about how to pass the referendum when the board hasn’t even approved the referendum present on tonight’s agenda,” Cole said Wednesday, adding that she questioned if there wasn’t already sufficient space to house grades 7-8 in the existing school without the need for an addition.
Communication deemed key
A member of the public at Wednesday’s meeting also questioned why more senior citizens hadn’t been invited to be part of the transition committee’s recent deliberations, especially when several seniors had expressed interest at informational presentations hosted by Gelderman in January in having more input into future decisions affecting the school district.
Gelderman responded that “they haven’t come to the committee or, as far as I’m aware, come to the school and said we’d like to meet with the board.”
Borrego, further addressing those concerns, said the transition committee never set out to exclude anyone but, rather, chose to meet with a select group of residents because of their specific interest or expertise in areas such as building, electronics and construction finance.
“What we will do, just like what we did before, is we will have information sessions again during the day so it’s easier for the senior group to come, and we’ll have meetings at night like we did in the gymnasium last year so people can come and ask questions, and we’ll have our architect there,” Borrego said.
Krista Mikulski, a parent who strongly supports the K-8 school proposal, nevertheless urged the board not to dismiss others’ concerns about the lack of inclusion in the transition committee’s deliberations.
“A lot of the same people come to these meetings, and maybe we don’t all agree, but they all want information so I would challenge you to be a little better with that,” she said.
Mikulski also urged the board to make a greater effort at marketing the Montague Elementary School, whose students academically outperformed their peers in the more affluent districts of Frankford and Lafayette last year, according to performance reports issued by the state Department of Education.
Both Frankford and Lafayette had once been eyed as a possible future home for Montague’s seventh- and eighth-graders but ultimately opted not to pursue such an arrangement.
The performance report for Montague Elementary School also gave it a high ranking compared to other schools across the state and ranked it very high in comparison to its peers with similar demographic and socioeconomic makeups.
“K to eight is something we should all be striving for,” Mikulski said.
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