The Hoboken Board of Education celebrated the exit of one of its three elementary schools from a state-run monitoring program, thanks to consistent improvement in student test scores among other factors, at its final meeting of the 2014-15 school year on Tuesday.
The Thomas G. Connors School was classified as a “Focus School” in 2012 as a result of the low standardized test performances of its black students and students with disabilities in comparison to its Hispanic students, according to its principal, Gerald Fitzhugh II.
Connors is the closest elementary school to the main campus of the Hoboken Housing Authority, and its student body is 30 percent black and 65 percent Hispanic. Eighty-eight percent of Connors students are eligible for free or reduced price lunch, a common indicator for poverty.
In early June, Connors learned that it had met the requirements to be released from Focus status as of Tuesday, most notably by improving its scores on the statewide NJASK exam. For example, 96 percent of the third graders and 79 percent of the sixth graders at Connors scored proficient in math on NJASK last year, according to Fitzhugh.
Connors met all of its performance targets for student achievement and student growth on the 2013-14 NJASK test, and was the only school in the Hoboken district to do so.
“We have a staff who are committed to teaching and learning as well as developing the whole child.” – Gerald Fitzhugh
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On Tuesday, City Council President Ravi Bhalla presented Fitzhugh with a proclamation from the city recognizing him and his faculty and staff for their “remarkable achievement.”
“Teaching is not an individual effort; it’s a collective effort,” said Bhalla. “I’m honored that Principal Fitzhugh has led tremendous improvement at Connors and made it on par with the other elementary schools in the Hoboken school district.”
Committed process
As a Focus School, Connors had to prepare a strategic plan to identify and address the issues that led to its achievement gap. Fitzhugh arrived at the school just after Focus status was given in 2012, and he said he has worked tirelessly to cure the underlying issues that fuel student underperformance.
Through a Rutgers University workshop, Fitzhugh learned about positive behavioral support, a system that seeks to address detrimental behavior in the classroom by first understanding what purpose it serves for a student.
This data-driven method was combined with home visits by school support staff to ensure that any problems arising from a child’s home life could be addressed on all fronts.
Through these efforts, Connors was able to reduce its suspension rate, allowing its students to spend more time at school and improve their test scores, according to Fitzhugh.
In addition, the Connors Parent Teacher Organization was revived, faculty were taught to develop individualized action plans, and Fitzhugh committed to spending 85 percent of his day in the classroom.
Three times per school year, representatives from the Regional Achievement Center, the state body tasked with aiding underperforming schools, did walkthroughs and gave recommendations.
Despite the supposedly remedial nature of the Focus School program, Fitzhugh said he greatly valued the opportunities it afforded for focused professional development and strategic planning.
“They came so consistently that I had an additional lens to the instructional program in our building,” he said.
Now Fitzhugh says he wants to push for even higher goals. “The next milestone for Thomas G. Connors Elementary School to accomplish is Reward School Status,” he said. “We have a staff who are committed to teaching and learning as well as developing the whole child.”
Balancing budget
The Hoboken school board received some rare good news regarding its budget. With the 2014-15 school year now nearly concluded, Business Administrator William Moffitt found that the district had enough surplus left over to fully pay off its remaining food service deficit.
“Since this…is a one-time expense, that’s exactly what surpluses are for,” said school board member Leon Gold. “They’re not to fund ongoing activities that you can expect to pay for each year.”
A 2011 audit found that Hoboken Public Schools owed around $700,000 to its then-food service provider Chartwells, partially due to the failure to collect around $130,000 in food bills from parents in the 2010-11 school year.
The $700,000 deficit has been gradually paid down, and sat at around $150,000 as of last fall.
In subsequent contracts with food service providers, the district has inserted clauses guaranteeing that the provider would be responsible for any deficits up to a certain dollar value. On Tuesday, the school board approved a new food service contract with The Pomptonian, Inc. for the 2015-16 school year.
The school board also authorized putting up to $800,000 of its 2014-15 budget surplus towards repairing the high school football field. Gold said the board has yet to decide whether the field repairs should be funded via capital reserves, a budget referendum, or some combination of the two.
However, school board members pointed to looming potential changes in the way the Hoboken school district is funded at the state and federal level, warning that they could lead to future cuts.
Moffitt said proposed changes to the formula for calculating federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Title I grants, first pointed out by board member Peter Biancamano last month, would favor smaller and more rural districts, leading to a drop in funding for Hoboken. The language is being considered but has not been officially included in the bill reauthorizing NCLB.
This past school year, Hoboken public schools received $818,000 in Title I grants.
In addition, the 2015-16 state budget proposed by Gov. Christopher Christie would increase the payments made by traditional public school districts to charter schools by $37.5 million while adding no additional state aid for the districts as an offset, according to the Office of Legislative Services.
According to Moffitt, the Hoboken school district would not be affected by these proposed changes for the upcoming school year, though he could not guarantee the same for subsequent years.
On Tuesday, the school board passed a resolution calling on Christie and the New Jersey Legislature to “maintain the integrity of funding for all of New Jersey’s public school students by funding district and charter public schools in strict accordance with Abbott v. Burke, the Charter School Program Act of 1995, and the School Funding Reform Act (SFRA) of 2008.”
Charter argument continues
Last month, a state appellate court declined the Board of Education’s legal attempt to postpone the expansion of the Hoboken Dual Language Charter School (HoLa) to seventh and eighth grades.
At the meeting, several parents of children at the charter school again called on the board to drop its lawsuit seeking an end to the expansion.
The school board has argued that HoLa’s admissions policies have led to increased racial and socioeconomic segregation in the traditional public school district, and that its growth draws too much tax money from an already tight district budget.
HoLa has denied these claims, and the state Department of Education has sided with them in a series of administrative reviews over the past year. Now the case will have a full hearing in state appellate court.
“I want my kids to continue the bilingual immersion education that makes Hoboken very unique,” said Sonia Petrocelli, whose daughter is among the incoming HoLa seventh grade class. “If we could please work together, put our heads together…and create and continue with a public school system…that has the potential to be one of the best.”
School board member Irene Sobolov responded that she was not sure what working together meant, given the zero-sum nature of charter school payments in an era of flat state funding for public schools.
“An equivalent argument would be for our parents to get up at a meeting and say ‘Please stop the applications’ ” to HoLa, she said. “Nobody would ever ask for that, it would be insanity, but we’re always asked to drop the lawsuit or work together, which means to me, ‘Please just step out of the way, your kids take the million dollar hit, and we’ll figure it out later.’”
Carlo Davis may be reached at cdavis@hudsonreporter.com.