Jersey's
schools of hard knocks
As 1st day comes, and goes,
builder troubles continue
Thursday, September 08, 2005 • BY DUNSTAN McNICHOL
and STEVEN CHAMBERS • Star-Ledger Staff
In a Gloucester City classroom where
dozens of children were supposed to begin classes this week,
there's a hole in the wall big enough to walk
through.
Wires dangle overhead in other classrooms
in the city's Junior-Senior High School, while workers
scramble to lay floors and install ceilings.
"Our children are coming back on Monday.
God pray for us," Lynda Lathrop, Gloucester's school
spokeswoman, said yesterday after touring a construction
site.
The unfinished work has already prompted
Gloucester officials to postpone the start of school by one
week, despite assurances from the state's Schools
Construction Corp. that the repair work would be completed
in time for the originally scheduled Sept. 6
opening.
Now they find themselves among a handful
of communities in which miscues by the state's
scandal-plagued school construction program have caused as
many problems as the program has solved for administrators
trying to get a new school year rolling.
In Passaic, hundreds of pre-school
children had to be housed in a cafeteria and auditorium
while a wing of eight new classrooms awaited final
inspections yesterday.
In Trenton, officials scrambled to
prepare a former Catholic school in neighboring Hamilton to
replace an elementary school that was abandoned last month
after it was found to be endangered by toxic contamination
from a school construction site next door.
And in Long Branch, where the state
construction program is in full swing, local officials
sidestepped problems on opening day by assuming, correctly,
that the state would not meet a September deadline for
finishing a new middle school. Instead, the city kept
equipment in place in a middle school they were supposed to
move out of this fall.
The SCC is not alone in missing
construction deadlines or seeing summer building work spill
into the first week of the new school year. Local officials
in communities that handle their own construction work, like
Mendham and Readington, also delayed school openings this
year.
But the opening-day problems in
Gloucester and elsewhere are a new setback for a state
agency already under fire for waste and
mismanagement.
The corporation was set up three years
ago to manage a $6 billion overhaul of school buildings in
31 needy communities. It has been under investigation since
February, when a Star-Ledger analysis found that SCC-built
schools have cost, on average, 45 percent more than schools
built without the agency's involvement.
Yesterday, a management shakeup at the
agency continued as the corporation's chief executive
officer, Jack Spencer, left for a development post in Lower
Manhattan.
Kevin McElroy, SCC spokesman, said agency
officials were working overtime to finish the delayed
construction projects.
"We have more than 20 schools or
additions that seemed to go off very smoothly," he said.
"But I'm aware of some problems that we're in the process of
addressing."
In Neptune, Superintendent David Mooij
said students were able to move into renovated schools on
Tuesday because SCC contractors and inspectors for the
Department of Community Affairs worked over the Labor Day
weekend.
"It was tight, but we've been very
blessed by everyone's efforts," Mooij said. "We've done very
well. I have nothing but praise for all the people
involved."
Officials in Gloucester sounded a
different tone.
School board members in that South Jersey
town voted Aug. 15 to delay opening day by a week, even
though SCC officials appeared at their meeting and promised
the work would be finished by Sept. 6.
"It's been one delay after another," said
Lathrop, the Gloucester school spokeswoman. "You couldn't
put a child anywhere in that school today."
Passaic Superintendent Robert Holster
said it was difficult to see classrooms going unused in his
overcrowded district.
"We got a verbal (certificate of
occupancy) but God forbid anything should happen," he said.
"Some of the furniture isn't in yet either. With any luck,
they'll be in the classrooms by the end of the week, but
this is no way for a school system to operate."
Holster said district officials also were
upset that two dozen trailers abandoned last year in
anticipation of new construction had to be reopened this
month to house children. The district had to spend $150,000
on air tests and plumbing inspections because the trailers
had been sitting idle.
© 2005 The Star-Ledger. Used by NJ.com with
permission.
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