By Ron Leir
Observer Correspondent
EAST NEWARK –
East Newark wants to ask its residents, through a non-binding referendum, this question: “Should East Newark high school students be sent to Kearny High School instead of Harrison High School?”
The borough wants the question to go on the ballot for the Nov. 4 general election and the Hudson County Clerk’s Office has prepared such a ballot. Sample ballots were to be mailed out this past Monday.
But the Harrison Board of Education – which stands to lose a lot of money if the switch is done – has gone to court to block its neighbor from conducting the referendum, which – by itself – has no legal standing to change anything.
Hudson County Superior Court Assignment Judge Peter Bariso reserved decision at a hearing held in Jersey City last Friday. He will likely rule on Harrison’s request on Wednesday, Sept. 24, at 3 p.m.
The East Newark Board of Education, meanwhile, has hired its own lawyer to draft a feasibility study to make its case with the state Commissioner of Education to end a more than 100-year-old practice of sending its school children to Harrison High. East Newark has a single school which educates students in pre-K through grade 8.
But East Newark Mayor Joseph Smith, whose wife Marlene is president of the local school board, has previously said that the tuition fees assessed by the Harrison school board are too high for borough taxpayers so the borough is looking for an alternative – which, in this case, happens to be Kearny High.
Currently, East Newark is sending 125 students to Harrison High at a cost of $16,300 a year per student, according to Harrison school board records.
For the past several months, representatives of the East Newark and Harrison school boards have been talking about a possible compromise, with interim Executive Hudson County Superintendent of Schools Monica Tone serving as a sort of referee. At the same time, the East Newark school board is, through its legal advisor, pursuing the path toward separation that could take effect as early as the 2015- 2016 school year.
On May 14, the East Newark Borough Council resolved “to obtain the sentiment of the voters … on whether the send-receive relationship with Harrison High School should be ended and East Newark high school students [be] sent to Kearny High School.” And, on May 29, the borough asked Hudson County Clerk Barbara Netchert to put the question on the November ballot.
Princeton attorney Richard E. Shapiro, retained as special counsel by the Harrison Board of Education, filed legal papers last week with Hudson County Superior Court, asking the court to order the county clerk to “refrain from placing the proposed question … on the ballot,” or, failing that, to “remove the proposed question from the ballot….”
In the brief filed with the court, Shapiro argued that the borough exceeded its statutory authority in calling for such a referendum because state law limits municipalities to seek such action only to “… any question or policy pertaining to the government or internal affairs” of the municipality.
Viewed in this context, Shapiro reasoned, the proposed question “relates to an educational issue within the purview of the Borough of East Newark’s Board of Education,” and, therefore, fails to meet the criteria set by the statute.
As such, Shapiro says, the proposed question “… is illegal and cannot lawfully be placed on the ballot for the next general election on Nov. 4, 2014.”
In his legal papers, Shapiro cites a 1958 case known as Botkin v. Westwood in which the state Appellate Court held that Westwood’s municipal governing body’s proposal for a non-binding referendum on whether there should be a “deconsolidation” of the consolidated school district of Westwood and Washington Township was improper.
The court found that “this particular referendum question does constitute a prohibited intrusion … in school district affairs by a body which has no business intermeddling with them in the slightest degree except as the legislature has permitted.”
East Newark school board’s feasibility study is still in process but the Kearny Board of Education went on record in March to accept the borough’s students at Kearny High if and when that possibility unfolds.
