Schools Superintendent, Trustees Have Stopped Listening to Voters!
For more than a year the North Arlington Board of Education and Schools Superintendent have carefully plotted a transformation of this small, successful, suburban school district with a proposal that has called for $30,300,000 in new expenditures to transform our local schools into an expensive, bloated bureaucracy nobody wants, asked for or supports!
For the first time in North Arlington history this school board tried to convince voters that spending more money, buying a facility they did not need and then going on a “fact free” campaign to make it happen with dollar values far below the real cost to a beleaguered homeowner and longtime tenant. A proposal that gentrifies North Arlington into an extension of Harrison and Hudson County, beholden to profit-driven developers who want to stuff as much housing along Ridge Road as possible to suggest some population explosion that warranted the purchase of Queen of Peace High School with no public input at the cost of $7,000,000 in surplus funding, dollars that could have been used to provide tax relief to all.
For those like Mayor Dan Pronti who supports multiple dwelling expansion along Ridge Road fail to tell residents that this kind of “urbanization” of North Arlington will strip away the very character and values we have witnessed that drew national attention to our locale, and at cost as a value-added municipality to work, live, own a home and raise a family in a small, safe and affordable environment!
For whatever reason the legacy of former leaders like the late Mayor Joe Bianchi is being trashed for quick fix development that increases traffic and stress on municipal services with an emphasis on school property taxes and an ever growing plan to destroy the small town charm that has attracted urban dwellers for decades to a suburban solitude so many seek in the country’s most densely populated state in the nation!
Now that the Board of Education has gone 0-4 regarding referendums, what is next for QPHS?
A dormant facility that needs major renovations and upgrades, how does the Board of Education find the money to make this building operational?
But more importantly, how do they effectively govern moving forward?
For everything they strived for and pushed has been rejected by voters.
Do they reset and try to rehabilitate their goals and objectives or is it time for wholesale change in membership and leadership over at 222 Ridge Road?
You have an out-of-town Superintendent who has failed miserably with these ballot initiatives and the board members themselves did next to nothing to assist in a “yes” vote. Collectively they ignore anyone who wasn’t a school-age parent and one wonders if they even won a majority of those voting parents?
The myth that “pupil enrollment is exploding” and that all of these capital improvements were even necessary fell upon deaf ears as voters failed to link the benefits to the cost and that was the responsibility of the school district to do so.
It did not occur.
When you lose four times at 2-1 margins, something is terribly wrong and the first thing the Board needs to acknowledge is that fact and reality.
All of this could have been avoided had the Board of Education honestly rolled out their plan at once, from the acquisition of QPHS to the capital improvements they saw as necessary.
Without a voter approved sign-off on QP, the whole plan had no form, structure or support.
New gyms and air-conditioning do not enhance or improve the quality of education.
The good news here is that the people have the final say on major expenditures such the one’s proposed in these ill-fated ballot measures. Mayor Dan Pronti refused to support taxpayers and that’s something to keep in the back of your mind the next time he claims to be a fiscal conservative.
Effective mayor’s don’t sit on the sidelines or try to be all things to all people!
North Arlington needs to break-up this monopoly of thinking at the Board of Education.
President George McDermott has demonstrated no interest in what voters want or expect and should be replaced by a more conservative, practical thinking trustee who listens and responds.
There is a vacuum of leadership at the Board of Education and now is the time for someone to step up and challenge the current failed culture that needs to change and replaced with new thinking more in tune with the general electorate of North Arlington and that’s a good thing for our democracy.
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