HOBOKEN—In a legal motion filed last week, the Hoboken Board of Education has sought to temporarily block the addition of a seventh grade class at a local charter school while its larger lawsuit challenging the expansion is heard in appellate court.
If the motion to stay succeeds, the 21 HoLa sixth graders slated to continue on to seventh grade at the Hoboken Dual Language Charter School (HoLa) this fall will be forced to find a new school. With the application deadlines for local charter and private schools long since past, the district Junior Senior High School would most likely be their only option.
In late March, state Commissioner of Education David Hespe upheld his agency’s 2014 approval of HoLa’s expansion to seventh and eighth grade, closing a four-month review conducted at the behest of the Hoboken school board.
The school board first filed an appeal of the expansion last April, arguing that the move would exacerbate racial and socioeconomic segregation in Hoboken’s traditional public schools. That argument did not ultimately sway Hespe, who ruled in March that HoLa has had no racially segregative effect on the district schools and better reflects Hoboken’s school-age population to boot.
Hoboken interim superintendent Richard Brockel criticized the decision, which he said was based on flawed data and ignored socioeconomic issues and the effect of charter expansion on Hoboken’s school budget. A majority of the school board agreed with him, voting on April 14 to appeal Hespe’s ruling, although it decided to fund the lawsuit through private donations from now on. The official notice of appeal was filed two days later.
The motion to stay HoLa’s expansion was filed before the state Department of Education’s Bureau of Controversies and Disputes on April 27. If it fails there, the school board will file the same motion in state appellate court, according to school board president Ruth Tyroler.
Whether it fails depends on how well the school board is able to demonstrate that it will sustain irreparable injury if the stay is not issued and has a case with a reasonable probability of success in court, among other things. According to HoLa Board of Trustees President Barbara Martinez, such conditions will be hard to prove.
“It is unclear to us why the Hoboken Board of Ed continues to persecute our school,” Martinez wrote in a statement via email. “Not once, but twice the NJ Department of Education has reviewed their claims and declared they have no merit.”
“Our school has been successfully operating for five years,” she continued, “helping students from all backgrounds achieve high academic results – why wouldn’t the Hoboken Board of Education want a high performing public school to grow and flourish for our children?”
Given its stated commitment to seeing out the appeal, the school board argues that stopping HoLa’s seventh graders from matriculating is the best option.
“Not granting a stay would allow students to continue to enroll in grades that might not exist the following year,” wrote school board special counsel Eric Harrison in his motion brief.
If the school board wins its appeal, explained Harrison, the HoLa seventh graders “would be forced to change schools in the middle of an academic year, or to attempt to make last minute plans to enroll in a district or private school after the enrollment periods have ended.”
As of Tuesday, school board president Ruth Tyroler did not know exactly how much had been raised for the appeal, but she said the donations received so far would be disclosed in the agenda packet at the upcoming school board meeting on Tuesday, May 12.
“We know that we are going to be able to self-fund the appeal,” said Tyroler. “We wouldn’t have filed it if we didn’t know we were going to get the money.”