Rosa Lottery Staying As-Is This Year, Schools Officials Say

The Rosa International Middle School lottery will stick around as-is for at least another year, after school board members said there just isn’t enough time to make major changes ahead of the decision-making process for the 2014 school year.

The board had been weighing the possibility of wiping out the lottery and requiring students to make a firm commitment to attend Rosa if selected, instead of going with the waiting list the district has had in place since making it an open enrollment school, but there were pitfalls, policy committee chairman Steven Robbins said.

“There was a concern we’d have under-enrollment at Rosa,” he said. “Realistically…the committee decided for now, we will not be changing the lottery system in terms of commitment.”

That doesn’t mean the idea’s dead, however.

“We still want to have those discussions,” Robbins said. “If we want to make the change, that’s still a possibility.”

Rosa will also remain an open enrollment middle school, as well, despite plenty of feedback from the public about potentially making it a neighborhood school.

Logistically, it’s not something that could be done short-term, Robbins said.

“Given our many, many constraints and what it would take to do a full-blown redistricting, what it would take to retrofit Rosa…that’s just not something we’re going to be able to accomplish in the current cycle,” Robbins said. “The neighborhood school is just not in the cards in the near future.”

In the meantime, several board members said more needs to be done to change the culture around Rosa and eliminate the notion it’s the elite middle school in the township and somehow has special status.

“I think that’s flat-out wrong,” board member Seth Klukoff said.

Robbins, along with Superintendent Maureen Reusche and board President Kathy Judge, emphasized the point that all three middle schools are quality schools, and supported Klukoff’s point of view.

“We definitely need to work on changing that perception,” Robbins said. “There are some drawbacks to having your students go through Rosa. There are tradeoffs.

“I wouldn’t call it better, I would call it different.”

The district is making one change in enrollment at the district’s two other middle schools, thanks to district boundaries that split Johnson Elementary’s fifth-graders between Carusi and Beck.

Now, students at Johnson who live in the 08034 zip code—essentially the Kresson Woods and Haddontowne developments—will get the option of enrolling at Beck instead of being districted to Carusi, and would be treated as Beck students in the Rosa lottery pool.

Parents brought concerns about the district lines last year during the Rosa lottery process, and Robbins said a total of about 17 kids could be affected by the change.

“They would basically be choosing twice,” he said.

That change would go into effect for students heading to middle school in the 2014 school year, Reusche said, and wouldn’t affect former Johnson students already in middle school.