After the adoption of a budget full of drastic cuts including outsourcing special education paraprofessionals, the South Orange Maplewood superintendent of schools, PTA leadership and local parents are continuing to fight to reverse or soften Governor Christie's cuts in state aid to schools. However, BOE President Mark Gleason is taking a position of support for the Governor's actions.

At Monday's Board of Education meeting, Superintendent Brian Osborne took Governor Chris Christie to task for his "assault on public education."

Osborne repeated the remark yesterday in his testimony before a state senate panel in Paramus as he painstakingly listed all the cost-saving measures the district has taken and the painful decision to outsource paraprofessionals. Osborne cautioned that the state was on the brink of "dismantling public education" in New Jersey:

"There is no more low-hanging fruit in terms of cost savings. We are very close to the point where we have to dramatically increase class size in our elementary and middle schools, violating the teacher-student ratios in the Adequacy Model that you adopted in the school funding reform of 2008. This will have serious adverse impact on our ability to meet the state's demanding core content standards, especially given the fact that, like many districts in the state, economically disadvantaged students with high educational needs make up nearly 20% of our enrollment. We are supposed to be closing the achievement gap, not widening it."

Meanwhile, the Parent Teacher Associations in the South Orange Maplewood School District are not taking the hit lying down. PTAs are circulating a petition titled "Our Children Our Schools" which asks Governor Christie to fund schools at the formula levels mandated by the School Reform Funding Act of 2008.

An version of the petition that is signable online can be found at the ourchildrenourschools.org website. A printable version is available on the Clinton School website.

According to the ourchildrenourschools.org website, the School Funding Reform Act (SFRA), which sets levels of state aid for NJ school districts, was upheld by the NJ Supreme Court in May 2009. The website maintains that it will take only $60 million in additional aid to fully fund the formula in FY2011. "Most NJ districts would receive flat funding or small increases, but it would prevent devastating and unlawful cuts."

Another email is circulating among parents touting an online petition at the NJ Kids and Families website.

The petition also asks for no decrease in state aid to any school district in NJ in FY2011, no decrease in the 4% state-mandated cap on school budget increases.

Running contrary to popular sentiment, BOE President Mark Gleason, has taken a somewhat different approach to "support the Governor" that raised some eyebrows at Monday's meeting. We asked Gleason to elaborate and he provided these comments via email:

"I support Gov. Christie for recognizing the hard reality that balancing budgets in a time of economic sluggishness requires cuts in spending. Education, being such a large part of the state budget, cannot be protected from that. Per-pupil spending in our district has increased at double the rate of inflation in the past 14 years (89% to 44%). Yet there has been no measurable improvement in student outcomes as a result. I wish he hadn't waited so long to announce the cuts, leaving school districts almost no time to react before budgets had to be submitted, but I believe he is doing the right thing."

Gleason argued that towns that "respond by simply raising the local property tax to cover the shortfall in state aid" are just shifting the problem.

"The reality is that in order to slow the rate of education inflation, New Jersey school districts must find a way to deliver better education with less overhead and less staff. This means investing in and boldly experimenting with new technologies and new approaches to scheduling and school structure. I'm disappointed that our district's proposed budget in fact retreats from such experiments by delaying yet again the launch of a new middle-school technology curriculum and by steering clear of fast-moving innovations in virtual-learning programs."

Gleason's two major ideas for improving education while lowering costs are to build partnerships with neighboring districts to provide outstanding special education "for targeted populations at scale" and investing in virtual learning.

These are ideas that Patch is certain to explore in coming weeks, months and years.