In December 2021 a West Amwell resident made an Open Public Records Act request to the school district, asking for any emails or documents that mention the referendum, facilities or Class III officers, including emails to/from the 9 Board of Ed members and the Superintendent. The response to that request included over 3,300 emails and dozens of documents. These series of articles documents what we found.
The history of the final 2021 SHRSD referendum plan is an interesting one. People have been told that the plan was the result of years of work of multiple Boards, that it was “the Superintendent’s plan”, and that an enormous amount of study was behind it.
Documents in the OPRA Vault paint a vastly different narrative.
We have documented in other From the OPRA Vault articles how the district was held hostage by the Lambertville majority on the Board. The district had no choice but to keep a school in Lambertville. The district tried to appease those five BOE members by proposing a district wide PreK-6 school at the site of Ely field, but that option was widely criticized and scrapped nearly as quickly as it was proposed. Which left the Board in a conundrum. There seemed to be no way forward.
But then one sunny morning, a district resident emailed the superintendent with a solution. Here is the email from February 9th, 2021:
What is described above is exactly what the referendum turned out to be. The only difference between this plan and the final referendum was that PreK was kept at LPS (due to SaveLPS Board of Ed members being unhappy with the thought of PreK being in West Amwell).
The problem is, this was never one of the 10 options explored by passed boards. In fact, the conclusion of past boards was that trying to renovate LPS would be a mistake.
The Superintendent was pretty clear on this when speaking to BOE member Pursell in late January:
Another Lambertville member speaks more specifically about LPS not being a good renovation candidate:
This is pretty definitive: “Members of the community need to know that renovation at LPS is not a viable solution to our facility problems. The information from the state on funding plus reports about the building’s limitations helped me to see this“.
Yet despite the evidence that renovating LPS was a mistake, the BOE and Superintendent leapt at this option with almost no vetting. The architects were hastily consulted over the course of a few bare weeks, and this plan was forced down everyone’s throats, despite objections from nearly every BOE member that did not represent Lambertville. This plan was never part of the multi-year analysis performed by McKissick Associates and was never considered by past Boards. Instead, the Lambertville BOE members and Superintendents eagerly locked everyone into this one poorly analyzed option, and immediately put their PR machine into high gear promoting it.
