At a special meeting of the City Council Wednesday, Tim Calligy, the Board of Education’s director of facilities, came together with a team of hired consultants, engineers and planners to outline the Board of Education’s plans for the construction and renovation of the district’s school buildings and facilities for the next five years.
While it is the purview of the Board of Education, not the City Council, to approve any new school construction, Wednesday night’s special City Council meeting, which was a standing room only affair, was one of the first public forums where the Board of Education clearly laid out its approved plans for future construction, complete with proposed locations and timelines.
In the next several years, Hoboken will reap the benefits of almost $100 million in state funding to rehabilitate its existing buildings and to build new ones. The plan that was presented Wednesday calls for building a new middle/high school campus, and an elementary school. It also calls for decommissioning two schools, Hoboken High School and the Demarest Middle School.
The schools that are scheduled to remain open will be totally renovated. Hoboken High will be demolished, with an elementary school built in its place. Demarest, which once was the city’s high school and educated Frank Sinatra, will be renovated and used for another educational or cultural purpose.
History
On July 18, 2000 the New Jersey Educational Facilities Construction and Financing Act was signed into law. It will result in the state’s investment of $8.6 billion in public school construction in New Jersey over the next decade, including full funding by the state of all school renovation and construction projects in 28 “special needs” urban school districts, known as the Abbott school districts, of which Hoboken is one.
Under that legislation, the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (EDA) is entrusted with the responsibility for financing, designing and constructing all of the school facilities projects in the Abbott school districts.
In July 2002, Gov. James McGreevey created New Jersey Schools Construction Corporation (SCC), a new subsidiary corporation of the EDA that has been delegated all the responsibilities for instituting the legislation, according to EDA officials.
According to SCC officials, each district must prepare a Long Range Facilities Plan that is reviewed and approved by state’s Department of Education (DOE) to ensure that they are consistent with State facilities standards and are educationally adequate. After the DOE approves a facilities project, the SCC has managerial oversight.
An urban education campus
In January, the city’s Board of Education and the state’s Department of Education approved an amended long range facilities construction plan for the district that calls for construction of a new high/middle school campus, one new elementary school, and the decommissioning of two schools. At the Board of Education meeting in January, the board outlined its plans at a public hearing, but there were fewer than 15 people in attendance.
Wednesday there were well over 100 interested Hoboken residents.
Assuming that an already-underway SCC feasibility study proves that the plan is cost-effective, the following are Department of Education and Hoboken Board of Education approved-plans for new public school construction over the next five years:
According to Calligy, the focal point is creating an “urban education campus” in the northwest section of town, with a brand new high school/middle school complex. When finished, the “campus” will be the public school district’s only high school and middle school. The proposed location for the new school is just west of JFK Field and Stadium, on Jefferson Street from 10th to 12th streets.
Neither the city, Board of Education nor the state currently owns the property where the school is being proposed. Calligy said Wednesday that the SCC has entered into negotiations with the property owners to purchase the property. Even if those negotiations are unsuccessful, the state does have power of eminent domain, more commonly known the power of condemnation.
Just north of the proposed “urban education campus” is the Cognis Chemical Plant, on 12th Street from Adams to Madison streets. That plant is scheduled to close in the second half of 2002, and the state and city have expressed interest in obtaining that property as part of the school construction plan. On that site, the plan calls for new athletic fields.
Several community activists have expressed their concerns about building athletic fields on top of a site that has been home to a chemical plant for the better part of a century. According to Calligy, before Cognis is allowed to sign over the rights to the property, they are required to produce a “due diligence” report that states that the site is free of contaminants. If there are contaminants, state law requires Cognis to clean the site to state standards, according to Calligy.
Closing of two buildings
Hoboken High School is slated to be razed. In its place, the approved plan calls for the construction of a brand new primary school, grades PreK through 4, at the site. Originally, the Board of Education had just planned on renovating all of the district’s buildings, but in a July 2002 finding, EDA officials stated that the cost to renovate Hoboken High School and Demarest Middle School would be more than the assessed value of building new schools.
According to Calligy, because the new primary school will only be a fraction of the size, a sizable portion of the lot is scheduled to be used as “open green space.” According to him, the proposed elementary school will only take up 64,000 square feet, while the current high school takes up 195,000 square feet.
All of the city’s middle school children will eventually be moved to the new campus. That means the Brandt School, which currently houses primary and middle school students, will become an elementary school only, and the Demarest Middle School is scheduled to be closed.
Calligy stated several times that the historic Demarest School will not be torn down but will be utilized for a “public use,” possibly as the future home of the city’s two charter schools (see sidebar).
The four primary schools that will remain open, Brandt, Connors, Wallace, and Calabro, will be completely renovated using the state Abbott Funds.
Timeline
During Wednesday’s presentation, Ed Rosen, a senor project manager at Bovis Lend Lease, gave the projects’ timelines for completion. Bovis is the global project and construction management company the state has hired to oversee the school construction projects in Hoboken.
According to Rosen, the project will be built in phases. The first phase, which runs from now until 2005, will include the construction of the high/middle school campus. According to the timeline given, the new campus is scheduled to be completed by summer 2006, and is expected to be open to students by Sept. 1, 2006, according to Rosen.
At that point, all the city’s public, non-charter, middle and high school students will move into the new space. Hoboken High School will be demolished and an elementary school will be built in its place.
Also in the second phase, the four primary schools that are scheduled to remain open will be completely renovated. In order to make the renovations possible, elementary students from Calabro, Connors and Brandt will be relocated to the Demarest School. The Wallace School is large enough, said Rosen, that students can relocate within the building and SCC can renovate one half of the facility at a time.
Several members of the public questioned whether or not the proposed timeline is optimistic. Beth Mason, a candidate in the city council election in May who is on a ticket that opposes Mayor David Roberts, called the timeline “extremely aggressive” and questioned if it is even possible to fulfill.
Rosen replied that he firmly believes under his direct oversight the project will finish on time. “I have every confidence that we will finish these projects on schedule,” he said.
Political side notes
With both the city council elections in May and the board of education elections in April, there was a little extra spice in the air Monday. Mayor David Roberts was at the meeting and lauded the new construction plan as step forward in improving the district’s schools. Roberts said he has been for the idea of a new middle school/high school complex since the beginning. “This plan is extraordinary,” said Roberts. “We are receiving $100 million in state funding that will ensure that our school children will have wonderful, state-of-the-art facilities.”
While Roberts praised the plan, his critics said Wednesday’s special meeting was nothing more than a “horse and pony show” to trot out before the public and press before an election.
“It was nothing more than an attempt to grab headlines,” said Councilman Tony Soares, who is running against the mayor’s 4rth Ward candidate in May. Soares was not able to attend Wednesday’s meeting because of a prior commitment. “He is trying to take all the credit for these Abbott Funds, but the reason that we are getting them is the Abbott vs. Burke decision, not because Mayor David Roberts asked for them.”
Roberts responded Thursday by saying that while he understands that the mayor and City Council don’t directly vote on school construction issues, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t show interest and support the city’s schools. “This mayor is taking personal responsibility for the schools,” said Roberts. “I’m going to stand up front and center to say we’re going to support all of our school children in Hoboken.”
Councilwoman Carol Marsh, who is the chairwoman of the Hoboken Alliance for Accountable Government, a political organization that is running a slate against Roberts in May, said Thursday that she was not impressed with the plan, and does not believe that there was enough public input into the final result.
“It was a disaster,” said Marsh Thursday. “The [Board of Education] is presented with $100 million to spend and didn’t do their homework. You don’t go behind closed doors and come out with a fait accompli. There was no real effort to reach out to the community on this.” What about us?
While the Abbott decision means a $100 million windfall for the Board of Education’s facilities, it makes no stipulations for the city’s two charter schools, the Hoboken Charter School and the Elysian Charter School.
Charter schools are public schools entirely funded by state and local taxpayer money. The difference between charter schools and other public schools is that charter schools do not report to city’s Board of Education. The school has a board of trustees that handles questions about curriculum and administration.
One of the biggest challenges for charter schools is that they do not receive any funding for facilities. Therefore they must find their own space to educate. Currently, the Hoboken Charter School rents space from the Board of Education in two separate buildings, and the Elysian Charter School rents space in the Rue Building from Hoboken Organization Against Poverty and Economic Stress (HOPES), a mostly federally funded program. The HOPES board recently voted to raise the Elysian School’s rent by 60 percent.
Wednesday night, dozens of parents and administrators from the charter schools showed up at the special City Council meeting to voice their worries that they might be left out with this new plan.
“Clearly the charter schools are feeling threatened,” said Hoboken Charter School parent Aaron Lewit. Several other charter school parents also expressed their concern about not being involved in with the new facilities planning process. Many students and parents carried signs that had slogans such as “We have no place to call home!” in colorful ink.
In the plan that the Board of Education presented Wednesday, there were no allowances announced concerning the city’s charter schools. Tim Calligy, the Board of Education’s director of facilities, said that according to the funding guidelines, Abbott funds can’t be used for charter school construction. During the evening, the protests reached such a raucous pitch that Mayor David Roberts had to approach the microphone on three separate occasions to attempt to assure the concerned parents that there will be accommodations made for the charter schools in Hoboken’s future.
“I want to make it very clear that the Hoboken Charter School and Elysian Charter School are going to have a home here in Hoboken,” said the mayor, who was the sponsor of the first public forum on charter schools in Hoboken in 1996.
One possibility that did arise from Calligy, Wednesday, was the prospect of the city selling or donating the Demarest Middle School to the charter schools. Under the Board of Education’s Long Term Facilities Plan, the board proposes closing that school.
But this option is problematic. Earlier in the meeting, Calligy said that even with $100 million in state funding, it was not cost effective to renovate the building. “There is a lot of work needed to be done to bring it up to code,” he said.
Jill Singleton, the co-coordinator of the Hoboken Charter School, pointed out that if the Board of Education can’t fix the building with a $100 million budget, “it’s going to be impossible for us to renovate without any facilities budget at all.”
So for now, with no long term facilities plans in place for either charter school, charter school parents and administrators are left little choice but to rest on Mayor Roberts’ pledge to make accommodations for them and continue to show up in droves at public meetings to have their voices heard.
Another issue that the charter schools administrators and parents raised Wednesday was that that they did not feel that there were effective lines of communication between the Board of Education, charter schools and the city. Several charter school parents expressed that they felt like they were left out in the dark throughout the planning process for the district’s new facilities.
Wednesday, Calligy said he would invite members of the charter schools to future Board of Education facilities meetings.
On Thursday, Roberts told the Reporter that he is considering creating a governmental school liaison to facilitate an open line of communication between the Board of Education schools, charter schools and private schools. – Tom Jennemann