Ridgewood Daycare Draws Attention For Impact On School District Budget

RIDGEWOOD, NJ — A daycare center, overseen by the Ridgewood school board and partially funded by taxpayers, that has cost the district hundreds of thousands in funds, has again drawn attention from residents, as the coronavirus pandemic winds down and the need to lend extra support to students returning to classrooms is increased.

"I am weary of hearing about the daycare," one Ridgewood woman said at Monday's school board meeting. "We are a K-12 district. This board should not be spending time managing the education of infants and toddlers."

She and another Ridgewood resident offered public comment, questioning if the district was assessing capacity in village classrooms to determine if class sizes needed to be reduced. The woman, who was in favor of class-size reduction, said there is already an "abundance" of additional classrooms available to accommodate students — at the Infant / Toddler Development Center.

Housed in a former elementary school, the childcare center, which was hotly discussed pre-pandemic, Board President Hyunju Kwak said, serves a proportion of children that is small compared to schools across the 5,600-student district. It therefore, she said, has had an "outsized impact" on the school budget, and has continued to lose money during her tenure.

Kwak, however, in an interview with Patch, rejected the notion that the district needed to cut class size.

"Having smaller classrooms might seem like a convenient solution, but I am not sure it is the whole solution," she said, adding that data does not indicate that the school system is at an inflection point where smaller class sizes would be needed.

"Issues in the classroom might make it sound like there is overcrowding, but class sizes here are not worse off than they are in other districts," she said.

Parents, she said, are commenting on class size against the backdrop of a few adverse events involving a student that have recently occurred in one or two Ridgewood schools, and they are justly concerned that students need increased attention as they return to classrooms.

"Not to minimize what happened, but these were specific incidents," Kwak said. "And to say that based on these acute experiences, that we should do a wholesale investigation, I don't know where the board sits on that, or whether there is reason or rationale for it."

And yet, she said she understands the long-standing desire of area residents to have a local area school, and that the daycare center as a school-based enterprise should not funnel funds away from the core population of students in K-12 classrooms.

"Ridgewood is one of a handful of districts that has what is basically a nursery school appended to K-12 programming," Kyak said. "I want to make sure that the center is profitable, and that we are focusing on the population that we are legally obligated to advance."