Here we go again. At the latest Camden School Board meeting, Superintendent McCombs announced a $27 million dollar deficit. This is the start of the financial crisis in the school district that we’ve all seen coming. And it’s here because the last leadership took the easy way out — it ducked the hard and unpopular question of school closures that would result from opening new schools.

Here’s CEA President and Camden resident Dr. Keith Benson on the issue: 

“$27M Budget deficit” and “If needed help doesn’t come from the (New Jersey) Department of Education, we could be facing mass layoffs and building closures” were the comments that reverberated in my brain. 

I had questions that needed answers, like: “how could a school district that was run by the State of New Jersey since 2013 be facing such a dire fiscal reality today?” and “when did such massive deficit begin? Ms. McCombs stated the debt was in place before her arrival to her current post and her administration had initiated efforts to close the gap, but still, here they remain $27M in the red.

Camden is not alone in this. Paterson Public Schools, having recently emerged from nearly three decades of state takeover, recently announced they too have a massive deficit in the amount $23M and would likely have to lay off approximately 232 staff members to close the gap. My deepest fear is that Camden will face the same reality here. I have long been a critic of the prior superintendent and his leadership of this great District chiefly due to his willingness to see our public schools suffer at the expense of the state-imposed renaissance schools (which only exist in Camden.) Upon his arrival, two rounds of layoffs of essential school staff numbering north of 400 people, the closure of eight public schools, and the result of the state’s 2018 audit of CCSD under his stewardship where some matters were referred to the Criminal Division, at least substantiate my vocal and longstanding concerns about the prior administration. And the District’s announcement of a $27M deficit further indicates that my, and many other’s concerns about the previous administration were, at least, credible.

Read the whole thing over at Blue Jersey. 

Here is a quote from Dr. McCombs from Woolston’s article in TapINTO (he’s becoming my go-to news source for a lot of these local issues): 

“We have been doing everything we possibly can to make those savings, to scrub our budget so those savings are real and we can benefit from them,” McCombs said. “However, if new revenue does not come through, there is currently considerable risk that we will need to take drastic action in the form of mass layoffs or building closures.”

Note the language here of “building closures.” It’s quite possible that what McCombs means is school closures and that’s where this gets really messy. 

You see, it’s one thing to argue that there need to be new schools. Schools are popular. There will be believers in new techniques or methods. It’s another thing to argue that a school needs to be closed in order for another to open. Then, the constituency that loves the existing school becomes involved. 

Yet, in the long run, we know that you cannot continually open new schools without closing other schools. In Philly, an attempt to convert Steel into a Mastery school was voted down by parents. And a Research for Action report found that “In Philadelphia, the report found, charters cost the district $8,000 per student initially and  $4,000 each subsequent year, even after five years.”

It’s not hard to draw a straight line between the deficits Camden is facing today, and its irresponsible financial decision to continue to open new schools without closing others, or to accurately present this tradeoff to residents and parents. The last time there were cuts like this, there were walkouts by students and protests by community.

The honorable thing to do, when discussing opening new schools in Camden, would have been to make these sacrifices clear. (Relatively) popular school openings would need to be balanced with unpopular school closings. Instead, the previous administration took the cowards’ way out — they pitched school openings, but delayed many of the inevitable school closings until after they were out of power so that they would not face backlash here in the city. So now, just as Camden is regaining electoral control of it’s school board, and hopefully local control of the district, it will face budget crises like these year after year. 

We all knew this was coming, including those who cynically expanded the base of schools while promising that there wouldn’t be school closures. That wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now. But it doesn’t make it any easier for those who are still in the city today, and have to clean up the fiscal mess of the previous administration.