By David Cruz
NJ Today
A decision by Newark’s superintendent of schools to overrule the elected schools advisory board is highlighting differences over the direction of the state’s largest school system.
Newark School’s Superintendent Cami Anderson is part charmer and part political animal. She is the most powerful superintendent in New Jersey, running the state’s largest school system with an ambitious reform agenda that has rattled Newark’s education establishment. This week, she used her veto power to overrule the schools advisory board when members rejected a series of leases for five charter schools. The resulting fallout is making an already tense relationship even more difficult. Antoinette Baskerville-Richardson, the advisory board’s chairperson, says the board rejected the leases, twice, because members got very little information.
“I understand that there was a lot of negotiations going on, but we had no knowledge of the conditions of any of those leases until the day before,” she said. “That’s the kind of thing that I think the superintendent, in moving forward, would change.”
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Like almost everything the board suggests, this advice is subject to the superintendent’s OK, and Anderson’s office says whether the board thinks so or not, the leases are good for the system, potentially netting around $800,000. The school’s Business Administrator Val Wilson says in-district schools are still the priority.
“With the charter schools we are expecting them to have some educational obligations,” she insisted. “They’re going to share their data; they’re going to share their performance information; they’re going to be required to meet our guidelines in terms of suspensions and student admissions. We want them to reflect the community which they’re in. These are all things the superintendent has put in place. She’s holding both sets of schools to a higher standard.”
The leases are just the latest controversy for the district. A few months ago, the superintendent closed eight city schools, several of which will now house charter schools, giving her opponents further reason to suggest that she’s the head of an invasion force bent on privatizing the city’s school system.
“Actually, I don’t think it is the superintendent’s perspective, per se,” suggested Baskerville-Richardson. “I think that it comes from much higher up and I would put it squarely in the hands of the commissioner and in the hands of the governor and that is probably where a lot of the plan that’s being implemented does originate.”
With 38,000 students and a budget of close to a billion dollars, control of this school system is a high stakes game. There are tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts and services to be controlled. Still, Both sides say the city’s kids are their priority.
We asked Wilson if she thought everyone in the system was on the same page, agenda-wise. “I think on differing issues, yes, which is true for any superintendent across New Jersey, but we have plenty of work to do, and we’re going to be very busy in the 2012-2013 school year.”
Baskerville-Richardson said it’s time for the superintendent to pay more attention to the advisory board’s advice. “We have a right to know what the long-range plan is,” she said. “We have a right to be involved in conversations about it and guess what? We have great ideas, and we’d like to see those ideas on the table.”
In a school system run by the state, the advisory board has little power to make its decisions stick. In this case, the superintendent, who reports directly to the state, found the board’s decision ill advised.