By VAUGHN WATSON
and HARRIET RYAN
FREEHOLD BUREAU
FREEHOLD TOWNSHIP -- The Freehold Regional Board of Education shifted some of the weight of redistricting from its own shoulders last night when it hired an outside consultant to develop a plan for balancing lopsided enrollments in its high schools.
Robert F. Savitt, president of the Long Island education consulting firm Guidelines, Inc., was not among the 500 people who filled the Freehold Township High School auditorium to half-capacity last night, but his vision of how the 7,625-student district can successfully maneuver through the divisive issue of redistricting was present in the form of a memo distributed to parents.
Savitt plans to:
The board, when it voted unanimously last night to hire Savitt, said it will have the final say in the redistricting plan, which will involve six high schools in eight western Monmouth communities. Currently, three of the five high schools in use are crowded, and school administrators have said when Colts Neck Township High School opens in September, they will relieve crowding by shifting students to high schools outside their home town.
The board expects to pay Savitt's firm $29,000, board President William Bennett said last night. Savitt plans to work alongside Wayne Verderber, president of Applied Data Services, hired to develop redistricting options, and Edward Murphy, a retired Suffolk County, N.Y., schools chief hired to communicate with parents and the news media.
To some board members and parents, Murphy serves an integral role as public relations liaison. Since July, parents have packed Freehold Regional meetings by the hundreds, railing at the microphone against redistricting the 195-square-mile district, pleading passionately to keep their children in schools in their home towns. Moreover, parents resigned to redistricting, and those too who want their children to remain in high schools in their communities, do not want the board to pursue a redistricting plan behind closed doors.
Last night, parents remained suspicious of the school board, even in the face of a conciliatory effort, as the board named Savitt to shepherd schools through redistricting.
Marlboro Township parent Sanford Goldstein drew wild applause when he drew parallels between redistricting and a controversial grading policy the board passed in July, called 5120.
"If you have the kind of input into redistricting that you had into 5120, I am afraid," Goldstein said. "If you think 5120 was a problem, just you wait."
Robert Silverman, Marlboro representative to Freehold Regional, stressed Savitt's plan would not be clandestine. "I hope this is going to be the most open process that has ever been carried out in this district in its whole 44 years," Silverman said.
Meanwhile, in New Jersey and New York, Savitt's firm has advised more than 70 districts who planned to reorganize, analyze demographics and enrollment, or build or sell schools. The overwhelming majority of the references the board received on Guidelines apparently are satisfied with the firm. But one, the Clifton Board of Education, was unimpressed by the consultant's report. In August, 1992, the board agreed to withhold the first $5,000 payment of a $17,000 contract to Guidelines until Savitt presented a more thorough report.
"We had people who did research. He took information from that research and put it in his report verbatim," Kenneth Kurnath, a Clifton school board member, said yesterday. "He did nothing -- nothing but take that information and give it back to us."
The Clifton board hired Savitt's firm to help it decide if fluctuating enrollment was cause to sell one of the city's schools. A majority of board members argued that demographic trends Savitt detailed had been unchanged for a decade, and that the district had already addressed growth in a study done by teachers, parents and administrators. However, the board hoped an expert opinion would validate their internal study.
"It sounds very impressive, to have an expert," Kurnath, a 25-year principal in the Passaic elementary school district, said. "But we were very unhappy."
The Clifton board eventually fulfilled its contract with Guidelines, "But more board members than myself were not pleased," Kurnath said.
Last night, calls placed to Guidelines, and to Savitt's Long Island home, were not returned.
Savitt, a former schools superintendent in Plainview, N.Y., is acutely aware of Freehold Regional's struggle to accommodate growth in crowded schools, Kenneth Carlson, a professor of education at Rutgers University's Graduate School of Education, New Brunswick, said.
"There are problems similar to these around the country: projecting pupil enrollment, and configuring regional school districts," Carlson said. He suggested, "What he (Savitt) may say to Marlboro parents is to phase it in, to open the new Colts Neck High School one grade at a time. That may allow some parents to escape it."
Source: Asbury Park Press and the Home News Tribune
Published: November 18, 1997
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