For the second time in as many years, the New Jersey Department of Education (NJDOE) has ruled in favor of a local charter school’s expansion, over the strong objections of Hoboken’s traditional public school district.
After the NJDOE granted Hoboken Dual Language Charter School (HoLa) two additional grades in March 2014 – approving the school’s request to add a seventh and eighth grade – the Hoboken Board of Education challenged the decision in state appellate court, arguing that the expansion would hobble its budgetary choices and increase racial and socioeconomic segregation in its schools.
Last November, after the Hoboken school board submitted more current enrollment data for both HoLa and its own schools, state education commissioner David Hespe requested that his office be given a second chance to review its decision in order to “more fully consider” the potential segregative effect of HoLa’s expansion.
In a March 20 letter to HoLa board president Barbara Martinez, Hespe said this review had “determined that HoLa does not and will not have a segregative effect on the [Hoboken school] district.”
Martinez hailed the decision as “a win for Hoboken families and kids, who get more educational options now, not fewer.”
“It’s a shame that the district spent tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars on a lawsuit that claimed segregation when all of the facts and data show that it wasn’t the case,” Martinez added in a written statement.
Hespe compared the charter school’s demographics to the census data for all children under 17 in Hoboken and not the population of children who actually attend the regular public schools. The latter group has a higher percentage of minorities.
In a March 23 press release, Hoboken Interim Superintendent Dr. Richard Brockel called Hespe’s ruling “flawed” and “extremely disappointing,” arguing that it “disregarded entirely the [school board’s] pleas to assess the socioeconomic and financial impact of HoLa’s proposed expansion on Hoboken Public schools and their students.”
“Socioeconomics is the greatest factor in predicting a child’s performance in school, not the color of a child’s skin.”— Ruth Tyroler
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To fight or not to fight
The school board has 45 days to appeal Hespe’s decision in New Jersey Superior Court, if it so chooses.
According to Hoboken school board president Ruth Tyroler, continuing the board’s legal fight would most likely require additional funding for its lawyer in the case.
None of the candidates in last year’s school board election publically endorsed spending more on the case, and at least one of the trustees who voted for the lawyer’s contract last year publicly reversed her decision during the campaign.
A successful legal challenge could put some of HoLa’s students in jeopardy, as 21 of them are currently slated to fill the charter’s seventh grade starting in August.
If the school board decides to appeal, its lawyer Eric Harrison said he would file a motion to stay HoLa’s seventh grade expansion before the 2015-16 school year begins.
Hidden segregration?
Part of the legal dispute between the school board and HoLa remains the demographic makeup of the respective districts and what it indicates about possible de facto segregation created by charter schools. Since opening in 2010, HoLa has consistently had a much lower percentage of black and Hispanic students and low income students than the traditional school district.
Commissioner Hespe said he found no evidence of a segregative effect caused by HoLa’s gradual expansion. In the NJDOE’s annual enrollment reports, he noted, the proportion of Hispanic students in Hoboken Public Schools has fallen from 58 to 53 percent since HoLa opened, while the proportion of white students rose from 22 to 27 percent and the proportion of black students stayed flat at 16 percent.
How can that be, if HoLa is absorbing a growing and disproportionately white group of children that might otherwise attend district schools?
“The data points toward an overall population shift in the last 10 years in the City of Hoboken,” wrote Hespe, in an apparent reference to the trend of gentrification that had brought more affluent white residents to Hoboken.
This demographic may hide a segregative effect caused by HoLa, said Harrison, but it does not disprove it.
“What the commissioner is really saying isn’t that there’s not a segregative effect,” said Harrison, “he’s saying that the segregative effect is being mitigated by other trends and therefore it’s not that bad.”
Under state law, the NJDOE must also ensure “to the maximum extent possible…the enrollment of a cross section of the community’s school-age population including racial and academic factors” in charter schools.
However, perfect demographic data on Hoboken’s school-age population does not exist, and the numbers the NJDOE and the school board use as the closest approximation diverge widely.
The school board uses its own district demographics, a choice Harrison said has precedent in past New Jersey court rulings regarding charter schools. They show a student population that is 73 percent non-white.
In his March 20 letter, Commissioner Hespe used the 2010 U.S. census data, which showed an under-17 population in Hoboken that was 57 percent white and only 26 percent Hispanic. Based on this data, wrote Hespe, HoLa “appears to better reflect Hoboken’s population” than the traditional school district.
Harrison said counting children aged 3 and under overrepresents the number of white school-age children in Hoboken.
“One need not be a social scientist or census taker to know that there are a lot of young white couples who live in Hoboken who have children and who are gone before their children are 3,” he said.
Skipping class
Hespe’s demographic discussion made no mention of class or socioeconomic status, focusing solely on racial diversity, a fact that both Superintendent Brockel and board president Ruth Tyroler criticized.
“Socioeconomics is the greatest factor in predicting a child’s performance in school, not the color of a child’s skin,” said Tyroler.
Only 11 percent of HoLa students qualified for free or reduced price lunch (FRPL), a common proxy for low-income status, in the most recent NJDOE data, although the school is seeking to install a low income preference in future enrollment lotteries.
By contrast, in the same school year, 70 percent of the students in Hoboken Public Schools qualified for FRPL, according to enrollment data submitted by the school administration to the federal Department of Education.
By ignoring the socioeconomic data, said Tyroler, Hespe also ignored the budgetary pressure that is caused by the district’s growing payments to charter schools.
Under state law, charter schools are funded out of the tax levy of the district they are located within based on a set formula. In the projected 2015-16 school budget, Hoboken’s payments to charter schools will increase by $524,956, $407,936 of which will go to HoLa.
Because low income students are concentrated in the traditional schools, said Tyroler, the effect of these payments is multiplied. “It’s having more of an impact on our kids because our kids are more expensive to educate…they require more services,” she said.
Will board challenge ruling?
According to Tyroler, the school board would only appeal Hespe’s ruling on the recommendation of Superintendent Brockel and with the support of the majority of the board through a public vote.
Any award of additional money for the school board’s lawyer would also require a vote of the school board. It remains unclear if the school board has the political will to continue its fight, especially if it requires more money pulled from an already tight budget.
When the school board voted to increase its lawyer’s allotment from $20,000 to $50,000 last June, only Trustees Peter Biancamano and Frances Rhodes-Kearns were in opposition.
In the November school board election, Biancamano was reelected, while Rhodes-Kearns was defeated and replaced with Sharyn Angley.
Last October, Angley refused to say whether they would have voted for the HoLa lawsuit, stating that she had not been on the board at the time and did not have all the information available to board members.
Angley would only say she supported “fair and equitable treatment per student,” but did not specify what this means.
Angley did not respond to further questions concerning her support for the HoLa lawsuit via email this past week.
Trustee Monica Stromwall, who ran with Angley on the Parents for Progress slate and was also elected for the first time last year, said she could not support additional funding for the lawsuit.
As an appointed board member, Stromwall had voted to pay Harrison an additional $30,000 in June 2014. But during the fall campaign, Stromwall said she could “no longer support any more money to be allocated to the lawsuit when the district is facing a very difficult budget for the next 2-3 years and we will need every dollar (and more) for the district.”
Stromwall’s statements may illustrate the shifting political climate surrounding the HoLa lawsuit. Mayor Dawn Zimmer, who endorsed the Parents for Progress slate last year, has come out publically in favor of HoLa’s expansion. Zimmer’s two children attended charter schools.
Carlo Davis may be reached at cdavis@hudsonreporter.com.