Felicia Palmer’s 6-year-old son, Jordan-River Samuel, attends first grade at Public School 3 on Bright Street in downtown Jersey City.
When her son enrolled in the Jersey City public school system, Palmer became more involved in her son’s education by heading the school’s Parent-Teacher Association. Now, Palmer is taking her interest a step further. She is leading a drive to stop her son’s school from becoming overcrowded with students from a different, underachieving school starting this September.
Palmer said P.S. 3, an elementary school, is going to take in most of the students relocated from the now-closed Public School 9 on Mercer Street, a few blocks away. School board member Angel Valentin said the school closed at the end of the 2009-2010 school year so the building could be turned into a separate academy for incoming juniors at Ferris High School on Merseles Street, which adjoins the P.S. 9 building.
“This is about the mishandling and mismanagement of students.” – Felicia Palmer
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School 9 was among the city’s public schools judged as “failing” by the state last year.
Palmer is putting together a group of other downtown parents concerned about the overcrowding at P.S. 3, and plans to reach out to local and state education officials.
She is one of a number of downtown parents whose children have enrolled in public schools in the past few years, rather than choose private schools or charter schools (public schools that operate outside the school district but are taxpayer-funded).
Not moving away because of the schools
The parents say that they’ve chosen the local public schools mainly due to economics and optimism that the schools can work better with more parent involvement.
The political controversy over schools superintendent Dr. Charles Epps’ contract extension has them concerned, and many downtown residents say they want a nationwide search for a new superintendent.
Epps has been the superintendent since 2000, but his current contract is set to expire in June 2011. Several of the Board of Education members want to extend his contract for two more years, but some residents believe the district should consider other candidates.
Palmer and other parents say the district needs to improve drastically. This year, according to state standards, 35 out of 40 of the schools have been judged as “failing,” including several downtown, like P.S. 9.
“It is unfair for students coming from School 9, a school that was failing, to [be placed in] one of the few schools in Jersey City not failing,” Palmer said. “All kinds of dynamics come into play when there’s overcrowding, such as students not getting along, and you can’t have a large influx of students coming into one school as it will affect test scores and how they learn.”
She’s said that a potential 120 more students will start school at P.S. 3 in September. That, Palmer said, is on top of the 570 students already enrolled.
She said the district and Epps should have handled the issue better.
“This is about the mishandling and mismanagement of students,” Palmer said. “We pay people to do a job, and do it properly.”
Palmer was scheduled to meet with state education officials by the end of last week on this matter, and she hopes they will find some way to remedy the problem.
She said that it is a goal of hers to get more parents involved in the Jersey City schools in general.
It’s about research
Peter O’Reilly, also a downtown Jersey City resident, has two kids in the public school system.
When O’Reilly decided to find out about more the district beyond what’s happening in his children’s schools, he wound up dissatisfied.
“As a parent whose child has attended public school here for the past three years, what I have found lacking is easily understandable: Objective, fundamental information on how well the schools are doing,” said the Warren Street resident. His daughter will start first grade at P.S 16 this fall and his son will start Pre-K at P.S. 3.
O’Reilly decided to employ the research and numbers-crunching skills acquired in his past job as an actuary and his current job as an information technology specialist. He has taken seven years of information about the Jersey City schools that he found posted on the state Department of Education website, and broken the information down into spreadsheets.
What O’Reilly found out was an “education,” to say the least.
Among O’Reilly’s discoveries was that the percentage of Jersey City high school students who passed the state’s High School Proficiency Assessment from 2003 to 2009 increased some years and decreased in others. He compared that to the percentages for high schools in Newark – the only New Jersey district larger than Jersey City’s – which showed an increase each year over the same seven-year period.
To O’Reilly, that showed definitively that the Newark high school district was improving and Jersey City’s is not.
O’Reilly also found that janitors and maintenance staff for Jersey City schools were among the top three percent highest paid school employees in the state, and the overall student enrollment has decreased steadily in the last seven years leading up to 2009.
The public schools open on Sept. 9. The next Board of Education meeting is slated for this coming Thursday at Public School 11 on Bergen Avenue in Jersey City.
Ricardo Kaulessar can be reached at rkaulessar@hudsonreporter.com.