At Tuesday night's Camden City School Board meeting, board president Kathryn Blackshear appointed board members Martha Wilson, Sara Davis, Ray Lamboy and new board member Brian Turner to serve on a newly created superintendent search ad hoc committee.

The group will be in charge of collecting and reviewing resumes for the next superintendent to replace Bessie LeFra Young when she steps down from her top post June 30, Blackshear said Wednesday.

A special board meeting will be held June 13 to discuss the criteria the board will use in looking for a new leader.

Young accepted a $62,000 buyout last week. Read story HERE.

Almost a year and a half after being laid-off, the last round of unemployed Camden firefighters will be back to work in the next few weeks.

Camden once again secured significant funding from FEMA. City and State officials announced Wednesday that a $5.7 million Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response (SAFER) grant will pay for the salary and benefits of 21 laid off firefighters.

Facing a $26.5 million budget deficit in January 2011, the city let go 336 workers, including 163 police officers and 60 firefighters. A $5.1 SAFER grant last year along with other state and federal sources of funding allowed Camden Mayor Dana L. Redd to rehire most laid-off firefighters.

This new round of SAFER money is expected to cover salary and benefits for the remaining 21 firefighters for two years. Fire Chief Michael Harper expects the fighters to start by July 1.

After the rehires come aboard, the department will have 205 firefighters to cover the 9-square-mile city.

St. Joseph’s Carpenter Society in Camden will administer the fourth phase of the Camden Home Improvement Program, which will provide $3.5 million in forgivable loans for home improvements, state and city officials announced Monday.

Loans of up to $20,000 are available for homeowners who earn below 80 percent of area income (for a single person that is $45,000 or less; for a family of four that would be $65,000 or less). Officials estimate that about 140 homeowners will be able to make electrical, gas and plumbing repairs.

Improvements in home energy-efficiency also are available through these loans, according to the state Department of Community Affairs, which is administering the funds through the New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency. HMFA and St. Joseph’s will receive servicing fees totaling about $700,000.

Residents who remain in their homes for at least five years after borrowing the money would not have to repay it, said St. Joseph’s director of operations Felix Torres-Colon.

The $3.5 million to fund the program is coming from the state Economic Recovery Board for Camden, which was set up during the 2002 state takeover to disperse $175 million in revitalization-related grants and loans. 

St. Joe’s will be screening eligible applicants and overseeing subcontractors. Applicants can contact St. Joseph’s Carpenter Society at (856) 966-8117 or visiting them at 20 Church Street, Camden, NJ 08105.

In case you missed it, my story Sunday talked about the new Camden City school board’s task of sorting through proposals for new Renaissance Schools, and possibly approving of up to four such projects, while looking for a new superintendent.

The Renaissance Schools – which, like charters, are privately run but mostly publicly funded -- would be in addition to the 11 new charter schools that are in the pipeline to open in the next couple years. 

Some residents and community activists have been critical about the proliferation of charters (and now Renaissance schools), arguing that resources should be spent on improving Camden’s traditional public schools.

But then there are others, like Milagros Torres, whom I quoted in my Sunday story, who have had traumatic experiences with the regular public schools and are crying for help.

Would a new superintendent help the situation? Doubtful, Torres said Friday.

Since her 9-year-old daughter’s attack by three girls at Dudley Elementary School in March, Torres has joined community activist Angel Cordero in traveling to Trenton on an almost weekly basis to ask for passage of the Opportunity Scholarship Act. Torres wants to send her daughter, a third-grader, to school outside of the city, if possible.

The Opportunity Scholarship Act would provide tax breaks to companies that fund scholarships so children in failing districts could matriculate elsewhere. It is one of a number of education-related bills that Gov. Christie hopes to sign into law this year.

But unlike the Urban Hope Act, the legislation that Christie signed in January and which allows for the building of Renaissance Schools in Camden, the New Jersey Education Association is totally opposed to Opportunity Scholarship Act. The association has called the bill a voucher system that boosts private schools at the expense of the majority of students by siphoning tax dollars from traditional schools. (My colleague Matt Katz wrote about the Gov and NJEA's clash over this a couple months ago. See story.)

In case you were wondering, the girls who beat up Milagros’ daughter, Felicia, were arrested and charged with aggravated assault. Dudley Elementary School principal Joseph Ortiz called the attack an isolated incident.Felicia is currently being home-schooled.

Dozens of Camden kids will likely not be sleeping tonight.

After months of anticipation, the North Camden Little League will host its “Opening Day” Saturday. About 225 boys and girls, ages 5 to 16, will be infiltrating Pyne Poynt Park in North Camden to play ball.

Opening Day ceremonies will begin at noon in  front of City Hall. The crowd will then parade up to Pyne Point Park, where local Brazilian band Phillybloco will perform.

The first pitch of the season will be thrown by the Mayor Dana L. Redd and the games will begin, kicking off the summer league season. About 50 coaches will be volunteering with the little league this summer.  

For further information, as well as volunteer opportunities, call NCLL president Bryan Morton, at 609-553-3788 or e-mail him at communitybuild@live.com

In case you missed it, the Camden School Board accepted Tuesday the resignation and buyout of Superintendent Bessie LeFra Young. Read HERE. 

Young will remain as the district leader until June 30. No word yet on who will serve as interim, though her deputy superintendent Reuben Mills told me at Wednesday's board meeting he does plan to stay. Also planning to stay is assistant superintendent Andrea Gonzalez-Kirwin. All three arrived in 2007.

The new school board, which assembled itself at Wednesday's reorganization meeting, will have the great task of putting a superintendent search process in place and selecting a new leader, while juggling all the changes coming to the district. The most notable of the changes being the "Renaissance School" projects and the new Regional Achievement Center. More on that HERE and HERE.

At Wednesday's school board meeting, Kathryn Blackshear selected by fellow board members to be board president. Martha Wilson will again serve as vice president of the board.

Wilson told me prior to Wednesday's meeting that she did not want to be board president because her husband Assemblyman Gilbert "Whip" Wilson was a co-sponsor of the Urban Hope Act, which allows for nonprofit entities to build up to four "Renaissance Schools" in Camden. She would rather not have to deal with the conflict of interest issue, she said, and added that she will be abstaining from any vote dealing with Urban Hope related projects.

New board members Felicia Reyes-Morton and Brian Turner said they are excited to be a part of the various changes that could come to the district in the next year.

The board will discuss how to start the search for a superintendent at next week's board work session, Blackshear said. 

The 2012 Camden City School Board:

Kathryn Blackshear, president

Martha Wilson, vice president

Sara Davis

Barbara Coscarello

Ray Lamboy

Kathryn Ribay

Sean Brown

Brian E. Turner

Felicia Reyes- morton

The Camden City Board of Education is set to vote Tuesday on a buyout package for Superintendent Bessie LaFra Young, who has drawn sharp criticism for having called out sick for the equivalent of more than a school year of time since being hired five years ago.

Young, a former top administrator in the Philadelphia school district who has a year left in her current contract, will be stepping down June 30 from her $244,083 job at the helm of the long-struggling district, two people familiar with the negotiations told The Inquirer.

Following the terms of her contract, Young would receive three months’ pay, totaling about $62,000, if the agreement is accepted by the board and then by state Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf.

Young in addition has filed for reimbursements for five years’ worth of travel and other expenses, the sources said. They spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the confidential negotiations.

It was not immediately known how much money she is requesting in reimbursements.

When reached at home Saturday, Young said she was not “at liberty to discuss” the buyout negotiations.

Read the full story in Sunday's Inquirer.

The Ronald McDonald House of Southern New Jersey, located in Camden, will celebrate Mother’s Day early with the presentation of gift bags full of pampering products.

On Saturday, the Lauren Rose Albert Foundation – a Cherry Hill-based nonprofit that helps mothers achieve economically and educationally --  will give gift bags to the 23 mothers currently living at the Ronald McDonald House with their seriously ill children. The gift bags, which are collected through the foundation’s Mothers Matter program, contain an assortment of items, including shampoo, conditioner, a loofah, body lotion, and makeup.

The families currently staying in the Camden house and seeking treatment in area hospitals are from all over the world. There are several local families but there are also people from Michigan, Ohio, Puerto Rico, Jordan, Trinidad, and Ecuador, according to a spokeswoman.

Jennifer Parrish, of Hazleton, Pa., will receive the organization’s 20,000^th gift bag since the Mothers Matter program began in 2001. Parrish is staying at Camden Ronald McDonald House with her 4-year-old daughter, Paige, and baby, Emma, who was born in April with spina bifida at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

In case you missed it, my colleague Matt Katz and I wrote a story yesterday on a State Commission of Investigation report that claimed New Jersey taxpayers pick up the tab for millions of dollars a year in salaries and benefits for government employees on leave to do union business.

The commission found that in Camden, $2.3 million had been spent over five years to pay the salaries and benefits for three police officers and three firefighters engaged in union business full-time. Union representatives from the departments complained the report was misleading because there were only two officers working for each union at any given time. (The state counted three, officials said, because there was a change in union leadership for both departments between 2008 and 2009.)

Camden firefighters union president Kenneth Chambers also said that, given the personnel issues the department currently faces, there needs to be a full-time union president.

I clarified that the report does not dispute the need for full-time union representation but, instead, that member dues should fund his salary and benefits, not taxpayers.

“If I wasn’t union president, taxpayers would still be paying for me,” Chambers said about being on the department's payroll.

Just recently, he said, several firefighters received notices from the city that stated that holiday and vacation time was being calculated in a new way that they would have to compensate the city thousands of dollars for time they took off.

“Dockings will begin on the Pay of May 11, 2012 and continue until the balance is paid in full,” the letter stated.

Chambers argues he did not receive any other notice or information about the change.

That’s the kind of issue the department faces constantly and it requires union members to have representation, he said Wednesday, adding that the report minimized the importance of the union work being conducted by employees on leave.

"This is union busting," Chambers said.

The report recommended that the Legislature ban or significantly curtail public subsidies for union officials. Some state and county officials said union fees, not tax dollars, should pay for the union representation.

A spokesman for Camden County, which is working to create a county police force that it hopes to replace the city force, said that under a county arrangement, paid leave for union leaders would not be funded by taxes.

Read full story here.