The Battle With The District

Before I move on to the homeschooling posts, I want to rant about how screwed up and ill equipped the system was to handle this situation. How the district had let the school, and probably not only this one, deteriorate to this point is beyond me. I’m not saying it was dilapidated or anything like that, but it was in need of some major repairs and it didn’t seem like they wanted to spend the money to fix them.

As you walked down the halls, you’d see some of the drop ceiling tiles drooping like they were warped from being leaked on. There were some that had obvious water stains and others where the water stains were clearly covered up by paint. They wouldn’t even replace the ceiling tiles! I want to reiterate again, this was a pretty popular suburb that we lived in and the schools had decent academic credentials. It’s NJ, so our taxes are ridiculous and as I mentioned in a previous post, more than 60% of our property taxes goes towards the schools. How could they justify keep these buildings in such disrepair?

I have no doubt that for the most part the teachers were good at what they did, I don’t know why they put up with these conditions. I believe the repair money was there, I also believe that the ~220k being paid to the Superintendent was outrageous! I read somewhere once that New Jersey has something like 600 school districts because each town wants their own schools.(I wanted to fact check here and just googled this. In the 2016-2017 school year there were 678 districts in NJ) Can you imagine 600 of these guys making that kind of money? No wonder our taxes are the highest in America!

Just a side note here, in my previous posts I called my oldest son “J”. He told me it’s no longer 2005 and it would be fine to use his name. My younger son agreed, my wife still wants to be called “my wife”. Moving forward I’ll address them accordingly.

Josh’s teacher was awesome. She did everything she could to help the situation. She was the one that asked the district to conduct the air quality test in the classroom. She even came to the house on her own time for the rest of the semester so Josh could finish her kindergarten class.

Part of the problem was that there were two kindergarten classrooms connected by a shared a supply closet. The teacher in the other classroom had been there for like 30 years. The closet was a big part of the dust mite issue as there was probably 30 years worth of dust in there.

I’m not sure how many kids were affected, or how many parents just thought their kids were prone to colds when they were in kindergarten because they were with other kids. How many people were affected by this problem until this one teacher said something? We’ll probably never know the answer, and the fact that they didn’t really find the source of mold besides the old rug really bothered me.

The district wanted to keep this quiet, I believe they told the principal not to discuss this with us at all and I also believe that the whole situation really bothered her. We’d had conversations with her previously about other things and she knew us by name. The fact that she “resigned” the following year was a sure sign that she either didn’t want to be in that situation, was forced out by the administration, or both. There was no sign of her leaving prior to this incident.

We wanted the PTA to help us get the word out so parents could be informed of the air quality and impending cleanup. They told my wife that they couldn’t do anything like post it on their web site or send out flyers. They had to remain neutral. My impression, and I could be wrong, was that the PTA was there to be a liaison between the parents and the school. They should want to inform parents of situations that could potentially be a health hazard. We had been to a few PTA meetings and it seemed like the officers just enjoyed having their names associated with titles like “President” or “Vice President”. I’m not sure how much work they really did. At one point my wife was emailing with the PTA president and her court. During an exchange of messages we got a “reply all” email from her asking for help on how to handle the situation. She probably meant to reply all, but neglected to remove my wife from the email distro. It was clear she didn’t know what she was doing or how to handle what was going on. I also believe she was pressured by the district to stay out of it.

At our urging, or because we were being pains in the ass, the district called a meeting to inform other parents about the situation and that it was being “taken care of”. We wanted to get the word out about this meeting but no one would help us do so. We were told flyers went out in the student backpacks on the Tuesday afternoon before Ash Wednesday and that the meeting would be Ash Wednesday at 7 PM. Gee, you think that was a ploy to make sure people wouldn’t show up? We did have the press there and they took some video of the ceiling tiles as well as what appeared to be mold in some displays in the lobby. They conducted a couple of interviews including me, but when it aired the anchors just talked about it a little and showed some of the video.

One of the reporters from channel 10 came out to our house one afternoon and interviewed Josh and my wife. It did air, but they never followed up so it really went nowhere.

During our Ash Wednesday meeting I asked the assistant Superintendent, who was learning to be pompous like his boss, how they were going to ensure the mold didn’t come back. His answer was that they were doing the cleanup and that's all they had to do once it was clean. Really? Because when you don’t find the source it won’t come back?

PEOSHA ultimately did their job and forced the cleanup. During that time we talked about Josh going to another school in the district about a mile or so away. We would have to provide transportation. The Superintendent at first wasn’t sure about that idea and during a very tense conversation told me he would think about it. I’m not sure exactly what he wanted to think about. That was when we decided to homeschool. How could we trust our son’s education to these people? How could we trust that the other school wouldn’t be just as bad? When he called me a couple of days later, he said, “I decided that I’ll let him switch schools”. I said, we decided against it and that we were pulling Josh out of school altogether and would be homeschooling him moving forward. You can probably imagine his response.

One more note here, we saw Josh’s teacher at a restaurant two years after this all happened. Her eyes were red and swollen like she was having allergy symptoms. Yes, you guessed it, the issue re-occurred in only two years.