PRINCETON: Residents ask charter school trustees to withdraw expansion proposal

Anne Burns, Mia Cahill, Molly Chrein, Rebecca Cox, Daniel Haughton, Martha Land, Sue Nemeth, Afsheen Shamsi, Michele Tuck-Ponder
To the editor:, We have all served Princeton as elected public officials, and we understand the critical importance of transparency, democratic representation and accountability to the community whose tax dollars fund our public assets., The Princeton Charter School trustees’ application to expand the Princeton Charter School by 76 students, at a yearly cost of at least $1.16 million dollars, apparently was planned by the charter school trustees without any notice to or input from the Princeton Public Schools or the greater Princeton community, which is responsible for funding this expansion, if approved. Forcing the Princeton school district to pay an additional $1.16 million annually to the charter school, plus even more in transportation costs, will be devastating to our public schools. These increased costs to the public school district would consume most of its entire allowed 2 percent yearly budget increase., We are all proud of our excellent, open-enrollment public schools, ranked among the best in the nation. The Princeton public schools represent generations of taxpayer investment, are our town’s most valuable public assets and the foundation of strong property values. If this expansion is approved by the state Commissioner of Education, it will surely and irreparably erode the quality and value of these public assets — and negatively impact the 3,700 children who now attend the public schools., The nine private citizens on the charter school trustees board are not democratically elected by our community. Although they are required to comply with the same transparency requirements as our elected school board and town council are, the trustees’ meetings don’t seem to be properly noticed, and their meeting minutes are often not published for months. The trustees themselves have said the expansion proposal is the result of “months of careful planning,” yet few, if any, public records reflect this., Our duly-elected public officials and the entire community only learned of the proposal less than two days before its filing. The charter school trustees’ secretive decision-making process, and the unfairly sudden announcement of their proposal, compound the anti-democratic, unjust nature of their harmful expansion proposal. The Princeton community and our children deserve better. For these reasons the Princeton Charter School trustees should withdraw their expansion proposal., Anne Burns, Mia Cahill, Molly Chrein, Rebecca Cox, Daniel Haughton, Martha Land, Sue Nemeth, Afsheen Shamsi, Michele Tuck-Ponder, Princeton