Dozens of
people promise to help P'burg School District fight for new
high school.
Friday, August 05, 2005 • By PRECIOUS PETTY •
The Express-Times
PHILLIPSBURG -- The first battle in the
war to get a new Phillipsburg High School built is to make
sure preliminary work already under way at the project site
continues, district officials told the public Thursday at a
special board of education meeting.
Superintendent Gordon Pethick said he's
learned the state agency overseeing the work didn't set
aside any money for it, a fact which could further encumber
the beleaguered high school project.
"If the site work package didn't
continue, we'd have some real problems," he said.
Last week, the same state agency
announced it would not pay for the second -- and much more
expensive -- phase of the project: construction of a roughly
$90 million, 379,601-square-foot structure to serve 2,000
students.
The school board called Thursday's
meeting to give the community an update on the high school
project's status. Dozens of people attended the
hour-and-a-half long meeting, many of them representatives
from municipalities and school districts that feed students
to the high school.
All of them promised to help the
Phillipsburg School District in its fight for a new high
school.
"We're not going to stand behind
Phillipsburg; we're going to stand next to it," Lopatcong
Township Board of Education President Ernie Gallant
said.
Former Phillipsburg School Board member
Irene Weller reminded the school board and area residents to
stay focused in their fight.
"What has happened has happened," she
said. "What happens from here on in is definitely up to us.
Now the only thing that's going to help is positive,
aggressive action."
Pethick said he's heard from Sen. Leonard
Lance, R-Hunterdon/Warren, and other legislators, who vowed
to do battle for the high school.
So far, workers are 65 days and $2.5
million into the 210-day, $7.5 million-job, which is phase
one of the overall project, Pethick said. If the job is
stopped now, all of the work completed would be lost, he
said.
Preliminary work at the site in Lopatcong
Township includes the construction of seven athletic fields,
parking lots and a three-quarter-mile entrance drive from
Belvidere Road. The access road must be completed before the
school can be built.
"Once something like this has started, it
would be a travesty to stop it," said school board President
Rod L. Pianelli.
Richard Shapiro, an attorney who
specializes in education law, told those at the meeting to
lobby their legislators, urging them to find out how much it
will cost to pay for Phillipsburg's project and others that
were cut from the state's list last week.
In the meantime, Shapiro plans to file a
petition with the New Jersey Supreme Court on behalf of
Phillipsburg -- and several other school districts whose
construction projects were nixed by the state -- asking it
to force New Jersey to pay for the new high
school.
Phillipsburg is one of New Jersey's 31
Abbott, or most needy, districts, a status that requires the
state to cover all of its Department of Education-approved
construction costs. Therefore, the district expected the New
Jersey Schools Construction Corp. -- a state agency formed
by former Gov. James McGreevey -- to pay for Phillipsburg's
new high school.
However, Phillipsburg was left in the
lurch last week when the SCC announced the high school had
been cut from a list of projects the agency plans to
complete with the last $1.4 billion of a special fund. The
fund was created in 2000 in light of the landmark Abbott v.
Burke rulings.
Hundreds of other Abbott district
construction projects also were nixed, including
Phillipsburg's plan to renovate Andover-Morris Elementary
School for an estimated $13 million. Only 59 of an
anticipated 350 projects are still moving
forward.
© 2005 The Express-Times. Used with
permission.