now low welcome to back story with joan goldstein and joan goldstein my guests today are two very very important people involved in the school and the school referendum debate which has been running pretty high these days to my immediate right is patrick sullivan who is the president of the board of education of princeton and beside him is daphna kendall who is the school board member and chair of the facilities committee since twenty seventeen welcome thank you thanks for coming well we've had quite a run here haven't we so what we were it is this show is called back story what is the back story well the backstory with respect to the referendum started about i think twenty months ago now where we realize and we realize for a long time prior to that that we had rising romance in school and that we hadn't had a major referendum in almost twenty years and so it was time to start focusing on that i think unfortunately for us because both f and i focus really on educational issues the main things that impinge on teachers and students more than buildings but every twenty years or so a board has to face a major referendum that's just a fact of life in the life of public schools and so we started a process whereby we came to where we are today which i'm sure will talk about to build consensus around what that building plan might look like and if i could just back up a little bit so back like pat said around twenty months ago in two thousand and sixteen we started looking at what we need to do and one of the first things that was an issue is the crowding the overcrowding of prince and high school and so at that time it was planned to move about twenty teachers into trailers which now sit in front of princeton high school to open up to more classrooms for students so it's addressing the iran issue has been something we've been working on for a few years now and this last step we basically use all the room that we have and so that's why we're at this point with asking we're proposing for a referendum i think it's more about the facilities then it was about it any other issues they're correct and i think it's a combination of both facilities being you know running through their useful life moment increasing number two and i think i'd ask if we were sitting and talking for what's causing the increase in the population why is there suddenly pressure on not enough room for students is there any kind of answer for well there is there's probably a few answers why it is i think we're seeing a generational change in town where older people are moving out and people with families are moving in so that's number one we're just seeing more people with families  and you know obviously princeton being a great public school is an attractive place for people of families to come to get a great education so we see demographic pressure from that number one number two we've seen  the housing stock change a little bit over time both respect to some higher denser density housing as well as tear downs and replacements that are bigger and house more people and more kids number two and then number three  we see in the future the fair housing settlement driving and a population increase in town and that's developed over time but we know that that's coming so those three factors at least is what's driving some of the enrollment we're seeing  well that helps to kind of us to understand why there's a possible crowding problem where it's coming from and how do we address it what do you think about what do you think as a member of the board educational capacity six hundred thirty six and we have seven hundred fifty four children there and my daughter is in sixth grade there and it's very crowded and then at the high school we've been overcrowded the educational capacity there is about i think too with that in rome and we saw at the you know we talked about two things one is the you know the depreciation of the buildings over time the way that educators educate is changed over time a little bit too so some  of the classrooms in the high school were built in one thousand twenty eight so in those days as everybody knows there is a teacher in the front of the room and and kids lined up in desks and st rose that's not really the way the teachers teach anymore  and we're not talking about open classrooms with that i grew up in the one nine hundred seventy s but we have what we are talking about is you know really important skills for any employer today is leadership working in teams having the right communication skills being able to think critically and sift through data everyone knows we've got a lot of kids today have much more data than any of us when we were going to school but they've got to be able to analyze it and figure out what's what's a true fact and what's a fast fact and how do they do that so teamwork is really important i'm an employer and and there is no job that i've ever had people do or that i've worked on myself where i want them to just look at their own paper and don't share with anyone else i want people to come together to solve the problem so teachers are teaching that way and often to do that you might have kids go work in a group by themselves we don't have the space the nine hundred twenty eight space doesn't really do that and so with this crowding we saw an opportunity not only to refresh the buildings but to refresh the way that the building oh it interacts with with people that's very very important isn't it you know i mean i'm a graduate of bank street calling for good u k ssion which was you know began i think in the one nine hundred twenty three and was a progressive school of progressive education for teachers and it was never lecturing we always had groups and we always had people talking with each other and the assumption was nobody knew everything therefore we share it with other and we learn from each other and therefore the student had the value also of having something to contribute and that's how i teach in that so i learned to teach so i understand completely and it's interesting that the geography of the room has to support that type of  educational structure does so that type of education is happening today and if you go to the high school and you walk around you'll see kids finding their spirit finding their group space in a hallway or outside or in the cafeteria and i think we have one large gathering space which is the performing arts center so we're not looking at change teaching or looking to we're suggesting we change the space to accommodate the teaching very good that makes a lot of sense so why was there such controversy you know i don't know why there was such controversy i mean we created a process whereby people had chances to give input and i think definite you counted we had over thirty public meetings in the last twenty months or public venues forums for people to come and talk but i think i'm not criticizing anyone i think there's still a feeling out there maybe people didn't pay attention in the first part and then they noticed later perhaps or maybe they felt they wanted more opportunity for input whatever it is i think there's definitely a thirst among certain people to have this project be a real dialogue and to have more questions answered about about the what and about the why and actually for some people about the i mean there are people who look at the demographic report and want to do their own math i mean there are people who really are passionate about getting into the details and stuff here in princeton and i think what we concluded ultimately is we need to give people a little more chance to understand the conclusion that we came through and let's say you know around one point zero now and in two point zero that you know we can share that with people and see if they agree with us or not and we certainly have have the ability to to give more feedback i think the other thing that made it contra controversial is that we're in an environment now where the federal tax law just changed and state and local property taxes aren't as deductible as they once were so we're in this kind of confluence of events where that's happening and so when people hear tax increase even though this is not a major it's a few hundred dollars for the average taxpayer but you know people just think well new taxes i've already have a tax pressure already and this might be the straw that broke the breaks the camel's back we're very mindful of that you and we can talk about the ways that we hope to address that but i think that cause some of the controversy as well but then you would get you made patients the other night you had a meeting and there were many changes about one hundred thirty million dollars and to address all the needs at one time and so that's an important fact to think about that's the the big picture even within that that hundred thirty million people should know there were twenty months worth of compromises in in that number and for me as an example i thought the number should be higher when you look at the schools and like to do more i came from a great public school in the midwest they had beautiful buildings and i want that for the kids of princeton here  but at any rate one hundred thirty was the original number and so that's one fact the second thing is that we're in a time right now where old bonds from old school buildings are almost run off but not quite so we have about three years left where we have as taxpayers to pay some of the old bonds and then if we had a new bonds on top of that it would cause a slight spike depending on the number for one hundred thirty million dollars referendum it would be order of magnitude three to four hundred dollars over the next two years and then from time zero seven hundred dollars in year three which understandably is a big bite and then it begins to decline as those old bonds go away so we're looking at this little spike in the first couple of years where it would be perhaps give some pressure to some taxpayers i think we've heard a lot of feedback over the twenty months about people who want to have more input into the design of the end and to understand really the needs and if responses to those needs number one number two we've heard from people who are worried about the tax landscape right now and that any tax increase would be painful to them i think we heard from some people who said you know i don't want to spend anything on  kids i don't have any kids but those were a very small minority i think there's a lot of engagement around supporting education in princeton but people wanted to see if there was a way that we could do it without causing too much financial havoc so what we ultimately concluded was there may be a way to do this that satisfies a lot of people's needs and that would include not the four hundred thirty but only a twenty seven million dollar chunk that really deals with some of the pressing facilities needs it deals with each of you see security i mean you put it all together so you could mention what great was so and also i just wanted to say with the tax impact fift so that's kind of part of the struggle that we had so but i think everyone even the people who are opposed to the referee were opposed to the referendum i think agree that after we've spent a lot of time giving tours and showing people the state of the facilities expression at the high school and i think everyone can agree that air conditioning needs to be upgraded our school security needs to be upgraded the best practices for school security were implemented in one thousand nine hundred nine after columbine and we are we're not compliant and we're not talking about making the schools fortresses we're just talking about having this a secure entry where before the person gets before person comes in that they're there's they're vetted as opposed to right now someone walks into our any of and we we decided that it's very important critical that we update the guidance area because right now it's like a rabbit me and a child comes in and right away they see a copy machine and they have to walk about seventy or eighty feet or more before they see anyone and if they're in we have one hundred fifty to two hundred kids in crisis every year and so we want to make the gardens department more welcoming and a little more private both her students and staff and also for families that are in there we've also proposed we were pro poker sorry proposing to add a second storey addition on the fitness center and the reason for that is to allow space for other sports including wrestling and fencing right now fencing practices practices in the cafeteria and wrestling doesn't have any space to practice where they don't where they can leave their mat so if the wrestlers want to practice they have to  out practice and then they have to clean them and roll them back up and put them away and for me it really is an issue of equity because fifty percent of our children who wrestle are children of color and that's that's just one part of the reason why we're adding the space for sports with the later start time there's a later and time we did a later start time because we thought it was there is clear evidence that it's in the best interest of the children children feel better when feel better when they get more sleep they do better when they get more sleep they can tell us car crashes but we also know that the day ends later and so there's less time for sports and you know we're hearing that some of the teams are practicing until nine o'clock and so there's every night yes and so some the spaces are triple booked so by adding this additional sports area that will also addressed that issue and sports not everyone is a scholar and so sports is a very  important part of principal schools not just for you know getting into college but also you know i think everyone knows that participating in a team sport in exercises is a really good thing for kids and then another thing that we would do next to the fitness center would be to add four classrooms and a common area for teachers a teacher a collaboration space so that will be part of what the new design we're proposing for the entire school would be so it would be a flexible learning zone and so that would add capacity for one hundred to one hundred fifty children we would also renovate the school store which is on the first level to make a distributed dining area so that all six hundred kids who eat lunch at the same time don't have to go to the cafeteria to get food and so they're sitting there already hopefully with a little more seating and just make it more comfortable for the kids and then two more things we would spend we're spending about one hundred fifty two hundred thousand dollars on water mitigation pack flood sometimes due to the design and so we want to work on that to make to make sure that doesn't have because it's not a sustainable practice we have insurance that covers us but it's very expensive material down there and we want to see if we can fix the flooding issue and finally we want to add we're proposing to add restrooms and water out on the fields right now there are republican restrooms and so if the schools are closed we've heard from neighbors of the high school that some of our visitors are you know visiting their house and so there's also no water source for kids  so if a child gets hurt to go get ice they someone has to run to the basement of the high school which is i had least a quarter mile away where the ice machine is to get ice and bring it back up on the field so by putting a little area for storage and  would solve a lot of issues that our athletes are experiencing so that piece is twenty seven million on that and so what we concluded is because you've got these bonds over the next three years if we stretch this out a little bit then we can pay off those bonds for the next three years and have a little bit more financial breathing room as a town to do more later on the one hand as a board we have parents of say young children who are saying do it all now because that's what i want for my child and we have people who say i'm you know financially stressed and any tax increase is going to be it for me so we have a long a big range of and so we think this is a fairly decent compromise if we start with the twenty seven million which is a very minimal tax increase in the first couple years like fifty dollars for an average home but it gets dressed in some of those critical needs the definitions mention number two start a mediated process from say now until may that gives people who want to provide additional feedback and an opportunity to do that and to influence the design process that would mean if we had that done by may we could have a second referendum in november of twenty nineteen sometime between s september to november of twenty nine hundred to deal with phase two whatever we conclude phase two would be that would give us new buildings are built out renovated buildings by twenty twenty two which is in line with our demographic bubble that we're experiencing so we think if we just stretch it out a little bit we give ourselves financial breathing room to give ourselves some kind of design breathing room and psychic breathing room take a little bit of  know anger and frustration out of the process and really focus on the kids and what's best for this community in a more holistic way so that's i think where we decided to come out that came up on tuesday at the school board  and that plan passed tend to zero so we have you know a lot of consensus within the board that that that's the right way forward and we'll see how it goes from here well i think they're lucky to have you both of you thank you because you're doing a lot of thinking and obviously what you pointed out is the enormous changes going on even if we talk about something like security schools were not so not so many years ago schools were not the center of violence now they are right and you have to respond to them in advance so you are pointing out things that we didn't have to think about and maybe other era right another time crowding yes you know i jog my memory because i remember when i went to high school and this  in new york there was overcrowding and freshman had to go at a late session and i remember as a freshman i didn't get out of school till like five o'clock at night and i didn't particularly like this but they had nothing else they could do they didn't have enough classrooms for all these children so you do get these bubbles these bubbles of population increase and you have to respond to them and you can't always build new schools so you have to think about how else you can deal with space and the absence of space i think you're doing a lot of good thinking over these problems and talking about the kids for example kids have problems and sometimes like everybody else but they do need help and i know that schools certainly need can can count flows and they certainly need people to help i was when i was teaching at a college no name to mention i had a student come up to me at the end of class one time and say i can't go home right now because if i go home alone kill myself and i said then you know going home you're coming with me but where was i going to take or the college refused to pay for a psychologist they wouldn't pay for a nurse when i was going to take her i had to take it to security who were very good by the way and who called in a hospital in an ambulance i had to wait and i never left her side until the ambulance came so she would not be left alone well it's a good end of the story is she love the nurses who took care of her she decided to become an earth and when she came back to the school she went to the nursing program so that's kind of a positive story but it's an example that as you're a teacher you're not there just to give information you have to respond to whatever is there whatever is going on and there are problems and you need people to help deal with these problems as well so you know well i think to as a as a board are our future duty is really number one to the children and to that then to the to the teachers and nude in the administrators and then to the taxpayers in that order at least that's the way i see it and you know i think many of us including me feel very passionately that it's important to do something now because it's just a cyclical thing if you look at princeton high school and on the right over the tower it was sixty thousand ninety eight to one hundred twenty eight so it's a thirty year period from one the district was organized that hundred ninety eight to one hundred twenty eight when they built that beautiful high school so every twenty thirty years this happens you need to upgrade facilities it's not the be all and end all would be on and off the teaching and the people in the buildings but still we need to do this as a town and and i think finding a compromise way forward like this where we figure out a way to do it in a financially less painful way that gives people more input is is the right thing to do because we didn't want as a board to do what's happening on a national level where people are ramming through things with fifty one percent of the vote we've we probably could have done that here and we might have won but the issue would be we would have a a lot of upset people in the minority and we need to find a way as a society really to bring everybody together around these issues rather than to take sides and figure out which side is going to win it's really said that the winners have to be the kids right and if we're fighting like that like i have said schools people move here for this a lot of people here for the schools and school should unite communities not divide them and and for whatever reason here in princeton the school the schools generate a lot of controversy and so for this right it would have been  i think we could have been we perhaps could have been successful but i would cost to the community there would have been a lot of angry people and i would not have been behind anything you wanted to do so they wouldn't want to help and you need their help absolutely solut yes well you're quite amazing you probably think you all first and i mean i guess some people are glad that you're doing what you're doing and i hope you stay with it if you have any kind of hopes or projections for the future us a question for you so i'm running i'm a candidate right now so i'm running for another three year term i hope to be reelected you know we've done great things in spite of having to  address our facility needs we extended teacher contracts through twenty twenty we we negotiated voluntary payments from institute of advanced studies and that helped because our operating income it does help the tax burden somewhat we negotiated an increase from the prince of theological seminary and we're also in talks with other nonprofit institutions we have extended superintendent i mean if you talk about student center and there's no one more students entered then our superintendent and as she should be and we're very excited that he'll be here through twenty twenty two and we've put a lot of great people in positions such as a new master visor we have a new supervisor of counseling and we have a new assistant superintendent for curriculum so great things are happening in the district i think so too i'm happy with that i said to the board recently that my vision for the school someday would be like a good liberal arts college i think one when a few years ago it was a great school but it was very rigid in its way of doing things both with respect to curriculum as well as the way that it treated kids so if kids were compliant and could do things well it was a great place for them if they couldn't or wouldn't or didn't have the resources at home or whatever then it wasn't a great place for them i think we want we want to and we are moving it to to an environment where people bring what they bring and flourish with those skills and learn those skills that i talked about that are so important for the next century which are leadership communication teamwork being able to think critically if we can have kids who agree with that yeah then we're successful as a community that's a big like critical thinking absolutely yes well i look i look forward to seeing what comes next from your leadership and i hope you win the election i should say  facility share the facilities you have have a responsibility there with looks like and i want to thank you both for coming on board because now perhaps as people watch this show there will be at least have a better understanding of what's going have people been torn apart why are people angry or not angry and what it is you're doing that's trying to help us move forward and maybe again we can appreciate good leadership and that's something we certainly need so thank you so much for coming to backstory with joan gold