Let New Brunswick Rebuild Redshaw School

Leave it to the state of New Jersey to take a huge problem and make it worse.

And leave it to a succession of governors to promise to fix the problem without actually fixing the problem.

The kids who attend the A.C. Redshaw School deserve better.

The story begins locally with plans to replace the Livingston Avenue school building with a new $44.3 million building. Redshaw was knocked down in 2004 and the students moved into a “Swing-space,” a pair of warehouses off Jersey Avenue with the assumption that construction on the new building would begin soon.

As we know now, that has yet to happen.

The reason is a history of corruption, incompetence and confusion at the state level that has stalled hundreds of millions of dollars in construction. Redshaw is one of a number of projects across the state that were placed on hold by the Corzine administration, with further delays following when Gov. Chris Christie took over in January 2010.

The state school construction program was created in 1998, after the state Supreme Court ruled that spending disparities between rich and poor school districts had to be addressed. The construction program was meant to bridge a facilities gap – rich school districts tended to have newer, better outfitted schools.

The program has managed to spend $8 billion since its inception, but with only modest results. New Brunswick, for instance, has a new high school, but Redshaw remains in the planning stages, as do several other local projects. The same goes for schools in cities like Newark and Trenton.

Part of the problem, from my perspective, is that the state has opted to treat urban school districts differently than suburban ones, imposing a heftier burden of regulations and forcing them to jump over hurdles not placed in the path of suburban districts looking to build new buildings.

Districts like South Brunswick or East Brunswick, for instance, must get state approval for their school plans, but once a project is approved by voters and plans are OK’d by the state, the district has a pretty free hand to push it to completion. School districts must follow the state’s open-bidding law, and they have a set of rules governing how the deal with cost overruns. Basically, they have a budget and they have to stick to it.

SDA projects, however, get managed in a different way and the results have been a mess.

If the governor is interested in reform of the school development process—and I believe he is, just as his five most recent predecessors were—he would give more control of the construction process to local school districts. The state should set a budget for SDA school construction, turn the money over to local districts and then have them follow the same approach used in suburban districts. Submit plans to the state, have them approved and make it clear that the budget that the district has for its school project is all the money it is going to get from the state.

Construction on the Redshaw School needs to be a priority for the state because it the state gave New Brunswick authorization to demolish the original building and approved the city’s plans for construction of a new one.