By David Cruz
Correspondent
In a state with more than 500 school districts, a state takeover of a local system is no little thing, and can reverberate for years. So far, just four systems – Jersey City in 1989, Paterson in 1991, Newark in 1995 and Camden in 2013 – have fallen under state control. And what does that mean? Well, the state – through the education commissioner – has control of every aspect of the district’s operation. Who they hire. What they teach. Where they teach. What they pay. What kind of local board they have. You get the idea. No school system that’s been taken over by the state has yet to return to local control – until now. At this week’s State Board of Education meeting, acting State Education Commissioner Kimberly Harrington announced that Jersey City had cleared the final hurdle to regain local control before the start of the new school year in September.
“Based on the most recent QSAC scores, the Jersey City School District is on track to have the final element oversight, in the ‘Instruction & Program’ category, returned to local control,” said a statement from the state. “The State Board of Education could vote on a resolution to return that final element to local control as early as its July or August meeting.”
QSAC – the Quality School Accountability Continuum – is the name given to criteria used to measure where local school systems are. There are five categories: instruction and program, fiscal management, governance, operations and personnel. A district needs to hit 80 percent in a category before it regains control of the category, all five categories before they can get their systems back. The news that Jersey City had passed the final test was greeted with a collective “it’s about time!”
“It’s a historic moment because if you look at it from the history of what it was back then and all the corruption that happened and now to see how the city has banded together,” said Jersey City Board of Education President Joel Torres. “The residents [feel empowered] and they have a love for their city, so I think this brings more pride to your city with everything else happening around us, brings more pride to the city and brings more people to understand what Jersey City is about.”
Jersey City would be the first system to emerge from state control. Right now they have hit 80 percent in four of the state’s QSAC categories. Paterson and Newark have each hit the mark in three categories and Camden, the newest state-controlled system, has yet to clear a category.
Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop, at a police cadet graduation this week, welcomed the news as affirmation that the state’s second largest city has righted its educational ship.
“It’s an exciting thing for everybody in Jersey City,” he said. “It just validates from an outside source that we’re making progress and for those people that had concerns about what they were investing in our schools and were concerned about our schools. This statement is an affirmation in that direction of ‘yes.’”
The city’s schools have to wait until this summer to celebrate, officially, and will be in a transition period come September, but on all decisions going forward, the state will be monitoring, but not controlling.