Englewood Cliffs explores break with Englewood's high school

• Englewood Cliff must pay $670,244 in tuition
• 38 students attend Academies@Englewood
• Two students attend Dwight Morrow
• The district has paid $33,800 to special counsel Vito Gagliardi

ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS — The borough school district has reached out to three neighboring districts as part of a study to explore the feasibility of severing its longstanding partnership with Englewood’s Dwight Morrow High School, according to the district's legal invoices.

A special attorney hired by the district to examine the send-receive relationship with Englewood has sought information from the Leonia, Fort Lee and Northern Valley Regional High School districts for a study analyzing the educational, financial and racial implications of pulling students out of Englewood's predominantly black and Hispanic high school.

The ongoing study could lead to a challenge against a decades-old Supreme Court ruling that cemented the bond between Englewood Cliffs and Englewood and barred all school districts in the state from admitting students from Englewood Cliffs on a tuition basis.

James Santana, superintendent of the Northern Valley school district, said the district has supplied information to Englewood Cliffs via public records requests and allowed a site visit by a representative of the district, but the district is not participating in the study.

“This came as a surprise to us,” Santana said. “We knew nothing about what they were doing. They just asked some questions about our district and said they were conducting some kind of study and polling some schools in the area. It’s nothing we discussed or asked for.”

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Most of the requested data were related to demographics, he said.

“They can explore what they want to explore, but it's a delicate subject and we don’t want to get involved in it,” Santana said.

The K-8 school district has paid more than $33,800 to special counsel Vito Gagliardi and three experts over the past 15 months to conduct the study, according to legal invoices obtained by The Record and NorthJersey.com.

“The Board of Education felt that they owed it to the citizens to have experts access potential options and do some analysis,” Gagliardi said. “They felt it was critical given the increasing cost of the relationship with Englewood.”

Englewood Cliffs retained Gagliardi, who specializes in send-receive agreements, after the state rescinded funding last year for district students enrolled in Dwight Morrow’s magnet program, Academies@Englewood.

The decision placed a $670,244 tuition burden this year on Englewood Cliffs, which is sending 38 students to Academies@Englewood at a cost of $17,638 per student, said Superintendent Jennifer Brower. Two students attend Dwight Morrow.

“Our board did not seek to alter the relationship with Englewood until our taxpayers were forced to pay tuition that we should not be paying,” board President Frank Patti wrote in an email to Englewood Cliffs Mayor Mario Kranjac this spring. “Currently, we are the only out-of-district municipality who has to pay tuition for the Academies.”

The district appears to have found a possible second option in Leonia. Trustees there agreed to participate in the feasibility study last summer.

Around that time, Fort Lee Superintendent Kenneth Rota wrote to Brower that the Fort Lee school board had agreed to discuss the possibility of Englewood Cliffs students attending Fort Lee High School as part of a receiving agreement, according to email records.

“This is contingent upon the Englewood Cliffs Board of Education successfully terminating their present send/receive contract,” Rota wrote.

Rota denied Fort Lee’s participation in the study last month in response to an email from a concerned resident.

Joanne Megargee, the Leonia superintendent, and Rota did not respond to requests for comment.

Brower cited both Fort Lee and Leonia as possible contenders for a second send-receive relationship with Englewood Cliffs, in addition to Englewood, in a Sept. 14 email to parents.

The email alerted the community to an Oct. 2 presentation of the feasibility study, which was then canceled.

Gagliardi would not explain why the presentation was pulled, only saying that the study has not been finalized. “We hope to be done by the end of the year,” he said.

Englewood Cliffs last attempted to withdraw from Dwight Morrow in 1985, when the school district petitioned the state Department of Education to terminate its send-receive agreement due to poor educational quality. School officials asked for permission to send students to the largely white and Asian Tenafly High School instead.

Englewood objected, arguing that the move would further segregate Dwight Morrow. It countered with a request for the state to regionalize the three school districts to improve racial balance.

The ensuing decade-long legal battle exposed racial tensions between the communities and ended with an injunction forcing Englewood Cliffs students to attend Dwight Morrow. Most have opted to attend private or parochial schools.

The Academies@Englewood program was born out of that fight in 2002 to attract middle-class and affluent families from Bergen County to Dwight Morrow to help integrate the school.

Today, the high school remains dominated by minorities, with black and Hispanic students representing 71 percent of the school population, according to enrollment data for the 2016-17 school year.

Dwight Morrow has been embroiled in controversy for most of the year. 

A state investigation prompted by the discovery of more than 3,000 graduation credit and grade changes found that the Englewood school district gave diplomas to students without enough credits and allowed faculty to teach classes without proper certifications last year. District officials are now pursuing the termination of 10 senior school officials.

Englewood Superintendent Robert Kravitz said the district is working hard to remedy past transgressions and pushed back against the perception that Dwight Morrow is "a bad school."

“I think people don’t realize how Englewood is changing,” Kravitz said. “If you think that there’s no learning, I think that that day has changed. We are rapidly catching up to everyone, and we will pass them, but it just takes time.”

Email: shkolnikova@northjersey.com