Do New Jersey’s shrinking public schools have a future? Spring Lake hopes so – Asbury Park Press

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SPRING LAKE – Norman Rockwell Elementary might be a more apt name for the nearly century-old H.W. Mountz School, the borough’s lone public school.

The two-story red-brick building along tree-lined Tuttle Avenue harkens to the days when children called their teachers “ma’am” and “sir” and spent their recesses playing marbles and hopscotch.

But there’s more to Mountz — named after a Harvard-educated principal who held the post for an astonishing 48 years — than mere old-school charm. Recognized as a National Blue Ribbon Award School in 2015, it offers first-rate academics, a 7-to-1 pupil-teacher ratio, a TV studio and high school-level geometry.

All it lacks, really, is students.

The pre-K-8 school ended the 2018-19 school year with 172 children on its rolls, down more than 30 percent from a decade ago. The current enrollment is roughly half the building’s capacity. 

Last week, 30 students graduated from the eighth grade, few enough for all of them to pile on a trolley after the ceremony for a celebratory ride through the 1.3-square-mile town. The class’ size actually was fairly normal for Mountz; the issue is that only a third that many children are signed up for pre-kindergarten in the fall — a net loss of about 20 children.

“That’s a problem,” said James Worth, the school board president, who serves on an ad hoc committee that’s assessing the school’s steep enrollment drop and long-term viability.

“My view, and I think the committee is in agreement, is that (the decrease is) going to continue,” he said.

You can see scenes from the Spring Lake graduation in the video below.

Statewide trend

Spring Lake is one of many school districts in New Jersey facing a worrisome decline in enrollment. Forty-one districts saw their enrollments drop between 15 percent and 35 percent during a five-year span ending in the 2017-18 school year, according to a USA TODAY NETWORK New Jersey analysis of the most recent enrollment data available from the New Jersey Department of Education. The chart below shows the districts are getting squeezed the most.

Eighteen districts lost at least 20 percent of their students. Spring Lake fell just shy of that mark, at 19.7 percent. The decline would have been greater if not for the influx of 16 tuition-paying pupils from out of town.

More: NJ school aid: Suburban districts pummeled; higher taxes and layoffs likely

Spring Lake’s predicament is hardly unusual these days. Overall public school enrollment across the state has been flat for years, a trend attributed to lower birth rates, an increase in the number of charter schools and a net loss of residents leaving the state for better job opportunities and a lower cost of living. 

Some urban districts have seen gains, generally due to gentrification and the millennial generation’s gravitation to cities, while many suburban districts have felt a pronounced pinch, particularly in more affluent communities in the northwest corner of the state and along the Jersey Shore. A year ago NorthJersey.com found that more than half the school systems in Bergen, Essex, Morris and Passaic counties had fewer students than they had at the start of the decade.

The trend has renewed calls to consolidate or regionalize the smallest of New Jersey’s 590 school districts — involuntarily, if necessary.

More: NJ property taxes: Is relief on horizon? Editorial

In May, a bill championed by Senate President Stephen Sweeney, D-Gloucester, was introduced that would force the regionalization of all of the state’s elementary and middle school districts into larger K-12 districts.

The measure, still pending in the Legislature, is part of a larger package of bills aimed at eliminating inefficient layers of bureaucracy and reducing property taxes. In all, 278 districts serving 303 municipalities, including Spring Lake, would be impacted.

Reporting that explains how declining public school enrollment and other trends in New Jersey can impact your family and property taxes is a hallmark of the Asbury Park Press. Please consider supporting local journalism by becoming a subscriber today.

Not enough kids

There’s no mystery as to why Spring Lake’s numbers are waning. Simply put, relatively few young families with school-age children can afford to live here.

The average home in Spring Lake is assessed at $2,038,000. That may seem like a relative bargain in a few years if the eye-popping new luxury homes going up all over town are any indication.

“People are buying homes for a couple of million dollars and tearing them down” to build something bigger and grander, said W. Bryan Dempsey, the borough administrator.

Second-home owners, many of them of retirement age, are behind much of the recent building activity, though Dempsey says the 3,000-resident borough doesn’t track what percentage of its 2,000 or so households are seasonal.

Worth, the board president, estimates that half the town’s homeowners here have their primary home elsewhere now, based on the number of darkened homes he sees in the dead of winter. Of particular concern to the school board, he said, is that many of the recent tear-downs had been rental properties, a major source of public school pupils in the past.

What’s next?

Where does all this leave the H.W. Mountz School? 

That’s the question the ad hoc committee is trying to answer, ideally before a state mandate forces the district’s hand. Worth expects the group’s recommendations to be ready by the end of the year.

To date, there’s little public support for closing the school. Raymond J. Boccuti, who is paid a salary of $145,000 for his dual role of district superintendent and principal, believes a “quiet majority” in town love the school and want to preserve it.

That pride and affection was palpable at last week’s commencement. “My classmates are like my family,” Class of ’19 grad Colin McNamara said. During the ceremony, several graduates were given framed artwork they’d produced, some as far back as kindergarten, that has decorated the school’s hallways for years. Check out a gallery of photos from the graduation below.

But moral support alone can’t sustain any school, even in a community as wealthy as Spring Lake. Boccuti, for one, says he’s hopeful that enrollment will stabilize within the next two or three years at between 150 and 160 pupils, as the district’s demographer predicted in 2017.

“I think we’re close to bottoming out,” Boccuti said. “I have other people tell me, ‘No, we’re going to 80.’”

If enrollment did hit that level, Mountz would be among the smallest public schools in New Jersey. (The smallest in 2017-18 was the Greenwich School in Warren County, with 63 pupils on the rolls, followed by the Beach Haven School on Long Beach Island, with 67.)

Mountz’s shrinking student base has forced the school board to “right size the staff every year,” as Boccuti phrases it. Another two full-time positions were cut in the 2019-20 budget, leaving a staff of roughly 50 employees. Since Boccuti arrived 3½ years ago, the school has lost eight full-time-equivalent positions, a significant hit for a small district, he said. Among other things, that kind of instability makes it harder to recruit and retain younger, lower paid teachers; lacking tenure, they’re the most vulnerable to a staff reduction.

The district has tried to economize by sharing a business administrator with Monmouth Beach (who has since been hired full-time), sharing a Spanish teacher with Wall and having the child study team coordinate pupil services for Avon. Seventh- and eighth-graders now take algebra together in the same classroom. The chart below shows how Spring Lake stacks up against other Shore area districts in a downward trend.

Spring Lake’s ad hoc committee is taking a hard look at what other types of shared services might be feasible, as well as ways to more effectively market the school to out-of-town families. The idea of consolidating with another district is also up for discussion, Worth said.

Two years ago, Spring Lake put feelers out to neighboring Sea Girt but nothing came of it. “They formally responded, ‘Thank you for the reach out, but we’re not interested,’” Boccuti said.

Rick Papera, Sea Girt’s superintendent/principal, said the solicitation centered on whether the district wanted to do a joint demographic study with Spring Lake. His school board declined, he said, because the district had just done its own study.

As with Spring Lake’s study, Sea Girt’s analysis predicted that enrollment would eventually level off and start to increase slightly. So far, it’s proven accurate.

Sea Girt’s enrollment fell 18.5 percent between 2013-14 and 2017-18, the Network’s analysis show, but since then it’s reversed course. Papera says he currently has 152 children on the rolls for 2019-20, a gain of 10 pupils in two years.

“We seem to be on an uptick, but I don’t want to count my chickens before they hatch,” Papera said. He attributed the increase to the fact that “we’ve had a couple of young families move to town recently.”

By “a couple” families he literally means two, with a total of six school-age children between them.

“Six kids, when you’re (a district) that small, that’s an impact,” Papera said. Consolidation, he said, is “not a topic of conversation for us.”

Worth doesn’t think Spring Lake ought to pin its hopes on a similar windfall, not with the direction real estate prices are headed  — “unless,” he added, “we can attract some young Wall Streeters with kids.”

Shannon Mullen has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and has won numerous other awards for his in-depth investigations and narrative profiles. Do you have a story idea you’d like him to pursue? Contact him at @MullenAPP; shannon@app.com, or 732-643-4278.