Proposed Kindergarten Program Updated By Chatham Superintendent

CHATHAM, NJ — The School District of the Chathams' future may include a full-day kindergarten program as well as a restructured school district.

At the regular Board of Education meeting held this week, Chatham Superintendent Michael LaSusa provided a brief update on the plan he revealed back in September to bring full-day kindergarten to Chatham and shift fifth graders to the middle school.

Although the plan would not be implemented for several years, precautionary measures are being taken to ensure that the project is even feasible.

LaSusa stated that his original plan is still being considered, and that as primary step administrators from Chatham Middle School will be trained on the Genesis scheduling system, which is a student information system used by the high school.

The Genesis system teaches administrators how to create master schedules that make better use of space, allowing the district to determine whether another grade level can be accommodated in the middle school.

"That will happen on November 30, and then that will give our middle school team some time, including over the December vacation to really zero in on how many classrooms they think they would be able to free up and how many classrooms they could then allocate to fifth grade," LaSusa said.

LaSusa presented a potential plan to the board of education on Sept. 29 that would implement full-day kindergarten, which would also call for a reconfiguration of the school district as a way to help combat enrollment declines.

According to LaSusa, the reconfiguration is a plan that will be discussed and explored throughout the school year, and if approved, it will not be implemented before the start of the 2024 school year.

While one of the plan's main goals is to increase enrollment, which has been an ongoing issue for the school district, it would also help them avoid redistricting, which is an alternative way to deal with shifting enrollments, LaSusa said.

Only five percent of New Jersey districts, Chatham and Kinnelon being the only ones in Morris County, do not offer full-day kindergarten to all students, despite the fact that it is not mandated by the state.

"Lack of a full-day program is definitely the single biggest weakness instructionally in our school district right now," LaSusa said.

LaSusa added that he had been questioned about and had presented different options for the reconfiguration and that he had given the board an explanation of why those options had been rejected.

"I've had some folks ask me 'why don't we just take our current elementary schools and make the all K-5 schools?' The why that is not the best course of action in my view is that we don't have excess capacity right now in any of our elementary schools. So simply converting our current schools to K-5 schools doesn't bring on board a full-day kindergarten, it simply disrupts the K-3 schools as they exist now," LaSusa said.

The Lafayette School in Chatham also lacks classroom bathrooms, making it more difficult to convert it to a K-5 school, according to officials.

The other proposed plan would make the Lafayette School a grade 7-8 school, which would be more difficult, according to LaSusa, because Lafayette does not have any science labs, which the children require as the curriculum becomes more complex.

"At the middle school we do have science labs. We don't have them over here at Lafayette Avenue School. We also just built a 3 million dollar design and technology stem suite at the middle school, expressly to try to create a pipeline for students who could then go into computer science, robotics and engineering at the high school," LaSusa said.

BOE President Jill Citchley Weber agreed with LaSusa on the plan to remain within the project's budget cap, noting that money was needed to fund the district's addition of mental health professionals.

The school district's budget can only grow by 2% each year based on the previous year's budget, limiting the amount of money the district can receive. According to Weber, the district is about to lose the state Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds (ESSER), which Chatham has been using for increasingly valuable school mental health programs.