Montclair public schools have lost 459 students during the pandemic – NorthJersey.com

If you had told Heather Weiss and her husband, Andrew Rockman, a year ago that they’d be transferring their two elementary-aged children out of the Montclair public schools, they wouldn’t have believed you.

And if you’d told them — observant Jews who are preparing their son for his Bar Mitzvah — that they’d be enrolling them in Catholic school, they’d have been even more incredulous.

Since moving to town from Brooklyn in 2013, they’d been happy in Montclair. The teachers were all “amazing,” Weiss said, the PTA full of involved parents, and her kids had made good friends.

But this February, with 80% of the state’s schools reopened and Montclair still closed nearly a year after the pandemic began, the couple began to sour on the district. Six planned reopenings had come and gone due to failed ventilation systems and union resistance. Protests, a push for outdoor classrooms, petitions and two lawsuits — one by the district against the union and another by parents against the district — hadn’t changed anything.

Even a recent agreement between the union and the district for elementary students to attend classes beginning in mid-April is contingent on a walk-through by the union and other details.

“There have been so many broken promises and no end in sight,” said Weiss, a producer for TED Talks who has been on hiatus during COVID.

They are not the only parents to reach the breaking point. According to documents submitted by the school board in its suit against the union, 459 students have left the Montclair public schools in the past year, with more than 117 transferring to private schools.

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The drop comes after years of increases — enrollment in 2020 was 6,670 — and despite a pandemic real estate boom that has brought an influx of young families from New York City.

The suit blames the decline on the “delay in restoring in-person instruction,” which it says is causing “irreparable harm to students.”

More than half of the students who transferred out of the Montclair public schools in the last year were of elementary age, according to the lawsuit. Younger students tend to fare more poorly with online learning than older ones.

When Weiss discovered that St. Catherine of Siena School in Cedar Grove had spots for fall 2021 in their second-and eighth-grade classes, “I was in tears I was so grateful,” she said.

Montclair private school officials who would speak on the record say they are seeing increased interest and have filled some of their elementary classes.

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Anna Younghusband, co-head of the Montclair Cooperative School, which enrolls students from preschool to eighth grade, would not provide statistics but says increased competition for spots is due to several factors — transfers from public schools, families moving to town, and a cutback in class sizes because of COVID.

Officials from Montclair Kimberly Academy and St. Cassian’s, which both have elementary programs, did not respond to requests for comment.

Daryn Sirota and Daniel Lewen’s 6-year-old daughter was about to start kindergarten in August when the in-person option was abruptly scuttled. Once remote school began, her daughter, who has special needs, would focus on the computer screen “for about two minutes,” Sirota said, then lose interest.

“Our daughter is not sitting in front of a screen all day; it’s just not happening,” said Sirota, a former teacher. “Seventy percent of what kids are doing in kindergarten is learning to interact with each other.”

She started “desperately searching” for an in-school kindergarten. “I can’t even tell you the level of stress,” she said.

She found her daughter a spot in the West Orange JCC’s early childhood learning center, which added a kindergarten option during COVID.

Paying the $18,000 tuition while paying Montclair property taxes is “painful — you don’t budget for this,” she said. “But I can’t imagine what would have been if we had not found this. She has had an amazing year.”

She said she and other parents have been shamed on social media for pushing for reopening, which some view as being anti-teacher or anti-union.

Two prominent players in town are leaders of the state teachers union, the NJEA: Mayor Sean Spiller, who was recently elected president, and Petal Robertson, head of the Montclair teachers union, who is running for secretary-treasurer.

Sirota, who grew up in town, says she knows families who have moved, some as far as Texas and Maine, at least partly to get their children into a classroom.

But she intends to stay and fight. She and her husband are plaintiffs in the parent lawsuit against the Board of Education.

Last week, Gov. Phil Murphy cited the aid to schools in the American Rescue Plan and said, “now is the time for all of our schools to meaningfully move forward with a return to in-person instruction,” at least part-time.

But Sirota said, “It’s not over until all students are back in school five days a week, with reasonable protocols for shutting schools. No more of this hybrid nonsense.”

She said she recently bought a security camera so “they can go ahead and egg my porch.”

“Everybody is afraid of retaliation. You know what I’m afraid of? Another year of garbage education for millions of children in this country.”

Julia Martin covers Montclair for NorthJersey.com. For unlimited access to the most important news from your local community, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email: jmartin@gannettnj.com

Twitter: @TheWriteJulia