Camden parents feel bulldozed on school project

When the chunks of concrete began falling, Camden's Lanning Square School closed and students were temporarily moved into two 19th-century buildings.

Nine years and $10 million later, the Lanning Square School has been demolished, architectural plans have been drawn for a new building, and adjacent homes have been seized by eminent domain - but the neighborhood is nowhere near getting a new school.

Now children's advocates are calling for an investigation into how part of the land set aside for a $42.4 million school has become a parking lot for a politically connected construction project.

"For them to take property that's designated for that purpose, ready to be built, and then behind closed doors, with no public process, no accountability, let somebody else use the property . . . raises serious concerns that warrant investigation," said David Sciarra, executive director of the Education Law Center in Newark, which represents students in poor districts.

"The public needs to know how this happened."

Questions also remain about whether the shovel-ready site is still scheduled to become a 33-classroom public school - or a privately run, publicly funded experiment known as a "transformation school" advocated by the Christie administration and South Jersey Democrats.

"This isn't the time for spending time on other types of schemes for which there's no legislative authority," Sciarra said. "These kids need this school now."

Residents' anger boiled over recently when they found out about the lease that allows construction equipment for the new Cooper Medical School of Rowan University next door to be parked on the school site.

"The medical school is going up, while ours was put on hold," said Katrina McCombs, principal of the Lanning Square School, which now meets at Fetters and Parkside schools.

While much of the Lanning Square lot remains a field of fenced-in wildflowers, the medical school is due to open next summer - just when the new Lanning Square School was supposed to open.

Sciarra asked the Attorney General's Office to investigate the Lanning Square matter earlier this month, and school district officials said they were requesting a meeting.

A spokesman for the Attorney General's Office said it did not discuss potential investigations.

The delay in construction began because of systemic financial problems in the state's school-construction program.

To address that, the Schools Development Authority under Gov. Christie whittled down a list of 52 previously approved school-construction projects to 10. Even though the development authority determined Lanning Square was a greater priority than half of the 10 approved projects, it fell off the list because another agency, the Department of Education, determined other schools needed to be built first.

By the time that announcement was made, the development authority already had signed a lease with the Camden County Improvement Authority, which is financing the medical-school project, to use a piece of the Lanning Square ground for construction equipment. Development authority spokeswoman Andrea Pasquine said that funds from the $2,500 monthly lease were going back into the school-construction program and that the lease could be rescinded if construction moved forward. Districts can reapply for construction funding next year, though no one was offering a prediction for when ground might be broken for Lanning Square.

For its part, the Camden County Improvement Authority said in a statement that it wanted to see the lot become a school and that using it now for construction vehicles "is a benefit to the neighborhood in that it keeps construction traffic . . . out of the neighborhood and city streets."

In June, it appeared as if the property had a new chance for life when Christie came to the Lanning Square neighborhood to announce a proposal to create a pilot program of transformation schools - public schools that could be run by for-profit entities.

The Republican governor said that there was no connection between his new proposal and Lanning Square's not making the construction list but that if the transformation-school law passed and the Camden Board of Education decided to host such a school, "that would be great."

Democratic Camden Mayor Dana L. Redd and Camden County Democratic leader George E. Norcross attended Christie's news conference. Norcross has become a vocal advocate of alternative ways of schooling inner-city children. He is also the chairman of Cooper University Hospital, which is opening the new medical school next door to the Lanning Square school site.

Weeks later, Norcross' brother, Sen. Donald Norcross (D., Camden), along with Assemblyman Angel Fuentes (D., Camden), a Cooper employee, introduced a bill to create the pilot program of transformation schools. The bill includes a provision that specifically allows a transformation school to take over land owned by the development authority. That provision would apply to the Lanning Square school site.

George Norcross, who has led redevelopment projects in his hospital's neighborhood, said he and the Cooper Hospital administrators had long wanted a public school on that property, but they have no interest in taking the land and directly running a school.

A transformation school, according to Sen. Norcross' bill, would be constructed and operated by a business known as a school management organization. Like charter schools, a transformation school would receive up to 90 percent of the per-pupil expenditure that public schools get. But unlike charter schools, the local school board would have to give its approval for the school to open.

Asked whether Lanning Square would become one such school, Sen. Norcross said that was "one of the items under consideration."

Although Norcross' bill allows for-profit companies to run the schools, a source close to lawmakers said a broad-based agreement on a new version of the bill is imminent - and it would allow only not-for-profit entities.

Meanwhile, residents' patience is wearing thin. After the Broadway School, which had been housing some Lanning Square students, shut down because of damage from the August earthquake, parents started questioning the delay in the new Lanning Square School. The youngest students - pre-K to second grade - now attend the 101-year-old Parkside School, more than a mile away in an unfamiliar neighborhood.

"At least here we had eyes," said Shaontae Stovall, as she waited with her son at the Sixth and Washington bus stop before he was swooped away to Parkside. "We don't know any of the residents there."

When principal McCombs stopped by the bus stop, Stovall yelled in frustration: "There's no crossing guards, no police! My baby's life is in danger."

As her child and others got off the buses at Parkside on Friday morning, drug dealers were standing on the corners. A young man in a black long-sleeved shirt and jeans shuffled white baggies as children in oversize backpacks walked by.

Even if a transformation school opens, busing students out of Lanning Square could continue because transformation schools would be open to students citywide. Local students would not be guaranteed slots.

In the absence of crossing guards at the new bus stop that takes the young ones to Parkside, one community volunteer, Lareen Blackney-Reed, wears a reflective vest - "Camden Crime Watch," it reads.

"We need a regular public school for these little babies," she said.