A Montague point of view
By Nathan Mayberg
MONTAGUE — For one Montague parent and former school board member, the decision to pull out of the district's relationship with Port Jervis High School wasn't about money or supporting the High Point School District, as was alleged in a recent lawsuit by the Montague School District.
Barbara Holstein, who served on the Montague School Board of Education from 2010 through 2013, said the reasons were chiefly the academic environment at Port Jervis and the "urban" atmosphere as compared to the more "rural" area of Montague.
Meanwhile, the suit filed by the current Montague School District Board of Education against High Point Regional High School to end the relationship between the two districts, was amended on Oct. 15 to name Supt. Scott Ripley and attorney Cherie Adams and accuse them of a conspiracy to redirect students from Port Jervis to High Point in order to benefit High Point financially. Adams has denied she acted improperly, stating her firm did not handle the negotiations on the High Point side, only on the Montague side, though her firm represented High Point on other matters.
Ripley has previously declined to comment on the suit.
Montague School District serves students from kindergarten through seventh grade. This is the first year the school is serving seventh-grade children. After seventh grade, Montague families need to pick a new school to go to.
Though Montague borders Port Jervis and some residents of Montague live just a short couple of miles from its school, Holstein says a movement to send students to High Point Regional High School instead of Port Jervis dates back to the 1990s and was about the differing character and climate of the two areas.
"That's urban, this is rural," Holstein said on Monday.
Another major component of the desire by some parents, like Holstein, to send their students to New Jersey schools (Holstein sends her child to another Sussex County school) is that Port Jervis is in a different state. New York, and has different standards than New Jersey, Holstein said.
The education at Port Jervis, "doesn't compare" to the level of education at Sussex County schools, Holstein argued.
A message left with Port Jervis Schools Superintendent Thomas Bongiovi was not returned as of press time.
Montague School Board President Tacia Johnson, whose three children attend Port Jervis schools, said she thinks the Port Jervis school system is great.
For Montague parent Jennifer Olenick, whose daughter has attended Port Jervis, the ending of the district's relationship will affect her plans for sports activities and would make her switch schools for the third time. Port Jervis also is closer to where she lives than High Point.
With the passing of state legislation in 2010 which allowed students in Sussex County to attend other schools within a 20-mile radius and get transportation from that district, Holstein said it was no longer necessary to have a relationship with Port Jervis.
However, 13 students from Montague are still attending Port Jervis even though a state education commissioner has thrown out the agreement between the two school districts to send and receive students. The parents of those 13 students have signed papers in which they agree to pay costly tuition to the Port Jervis School District so their children can still go there.
While the cost of tuition at Port Jervis for Montague students is less than High Point, Holstein said the tuition at Port Jervis will be higher by 2021 based on percentage increases agreed to in the contracts.
While its true that High Point has faced a decline in enrollment in recent years, enrollments have declined in all Sussex County schools since the 2010 legislation, Holstein said.
Holstein was a special education teacher at Montague from 2007 to 2009 before becoming a board member from 2010 to 2013. These days she holds two jobs, including one which involves her driving a bus that delivers students from Montague to Kittatinny Regional High School.
Some schools have a limited number of seats available for out-of-district students, which results in a lottery drawing system for where some students can go.
According to legal papers filed by the Montague School District under a new school board, one of the reasons some Montague families still support attending Port Jervis schools is to keep their families together.
Attorney Daniel Perez, who filed suit against High Point on behalf of the Montague School District and filed a claim with the State Office of Administrative Courts to overturn the agreement between Montague and High Point, argued that the decision by the previous Montague School Board to end its relationship with Port Jervis violated a clause in the contract that required five years notice. The send-receive relationship was ended in December, 2013 by an order of New Jersey State Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf, following a request by the Montague School Board.
Holstein took issue with the notion in the lawsuit filed by the school district that the previous board's actions were not done publicly in regards to the Port Jervis issue. She said they were all done at public meetings and the actions were discussed publicly.
Holstein said the "personal agenda" of the current board to support the families or their own relatives who attend Port Jervis is driving the district's decisions and "has created a path of destruction and confusion for all of the students in Montague."
Johnson said that while her three children attend Port Jervis, New Jersey State Education Law allows school board members to "advocate for their children."
Holstein believes the direction the new school board is taking is misguided and will rack up legal costs.
"They have taken a transition plan and deconstructed it into a legal nightmare," Holstein said of the current board.