Ridgewood NJ, The State of New Jersey requires all drinking water in our school facilities to be tested for lead during the 2016-2017 school year. The Ridgewood Public Schools are currently conducting those tests; the results of the schools we have received are listed below. The District promises to post results within 24 hours of notification for the remaining schools.
Please note that this summer of 2017 we are replacing old water fountains with filtered water fountains throughout the district.
Ridgewood NJ, GOP Gubernatorial candidate Joseph R. Rullo gave us some thoughts on public education policy ,”The NJ Abbott school districts need to be held accountable for wasteful spending and all districts need to work together to reduce cost. This will reduce the impact of inevitable changes in funding formulas with state aid. After all school districts cut wasteful spending, we need to implement fair funding formulas for property tax relief. One example is all school districts can drastically reduce costs by combined purchasing power. Another example is drastically reducing the number of Superintendents and redundant assistant Superintendents. High cost business administrators should also be reduced.”
Rullo , went on ,”Since the start of No Child Left Behind and continued under Race to the Top, NJ parents and students have been saddled with the Common Core Standards. Parents feel like they can’t help their children with their homework because it is something they have never learned before and the children are left floundering in schools with too many children and not enough teachers to explain things to them. The State then decided to force the PARCC (Partnership for Readiness for College and Careers) test on our children. This has resulted in schools and teachers focusing their teaching efforts, not on learning, but on test results. This is wrong and only hurts our children who deserve a comprehensive learning program not a regimen of tests.”
Rullo said as Governor I will end PARCC testing completely and direct the Department of Education to draw up new, independent education standards that will return NJ to the top of the best educated Students in the Country.
With the Trump budget increasing spending on school choice and the Secretary of Education pushing choice as well as local control Rullo is a big supporter of school choice and home schooling.
Rulo added , “Students come out of High School and don’t know how to balance a checkbook, write a resume or know anything about personal credit. Common Core needs to become Common Sense. Teachers need to be allowed to teach and not recite facts mandated from Washington, or some Corporation making money from our tax dollars. We need to provide better opportunities for students who decide to enter the workforce directly from high school with expanded vocational schools. The future of New Jersey depends on it!”
Trenton NJ ,The Department of Education today released the 2017 Taxpayers’ Guide to Education Spending.
“The annual spending guide is a tool designed to provide transparency to New Jerseyans about how schools spend their taxpayer dollars to educate students,” said Acting Education Commissioner Kimberley Harrington.
The Taxpayers’ Guide to Education Spending includes two types of total expenditures for school districts’ annual budgets:
Total Spending Per Pupil – Comprises all district expenditures, including costs paid by the state on behalf of districts, as well as fees and tuition paid for out-of-district programs; and
Budgetary Cost Per Pupil – Comprises costs borne by the school district, excluding costs that aren’t comparable among school districts, such as transportation and facilities costs.
For the 2015-16 school year, the average Total Spending Per Pupil in the state, which includes pension payments made by the state and other ancillary costs that vary by district, is $20,385. This is 3.8 percentage points higher than the prior year’s average of $19,641.
The Budgetary Cost Per Pupil, which does not include pension payments made by the state and other district-specific costs, increased by 1.4 percentage points, from $14,736 in the 2014-15 school year to $14,939 in 2015-16.
The Taxpayers’ Guide to Education Spending can be found online
InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) Notifies Guests of Payment Card Incident at IHG-Branded Franchise Hotel Locations in the Americas Region
NOTICE OF DATA BREACH
IHG values the relationship we have with our guests and understands the importance of protecting payment card data.
What Happened
Many IHG-branded locations are independently owned and operated franchises, and certain of these franchisee operated locations in the Americas were made aware by payment card networks of patterns of unauthorized charges occurring on payment cards after they were legitimately used at their locations. To ensure an efficient and effective response, IHG hired a leading cyber security firm on behalf of franchisees to coordinate an examination of the payment card processing systems of franchise hotel locations in the Americas region.
The investigation identified signs of the operation of malware designed to access payment card data from cards used onsite at front desks at certain IHG-branded franchise hotel locations between September 29, 2016 and December 29, 2016. Although there is no evidence of unauthorized access to payment card data after December 29, 2016, confirmation that the malware was eradicated did not occur until the properties were investigated in February and March 2017. Before this incident began, many IHG-branded franchise hotel locations had implemented IHG’s Secure Payment Solution (SPS), a point-to-point encryption payment acceptance solution. Properties that had implemented SPS before September 29, 2016 were not affected. Many more properties implemented SPS after September 29, 2016, and the implementation of SPS ended the ability of the malware to find payment card data and, therefore, cards used at these locations after SPS implementation were not affected.
A list of affected IHG franchise locations and respective time frames, which may vary by location, is available here.
What Information Was Involved
The malware searched for track data (which sometimes has cardholder name in addition to card number, expiration date, and internal verification code) read from the magnetic stripe of a payment card as it was being routed through the affected hotel server. There is no indication that other guest information was affected.
What You Can Do
It is always advisable to remain vigilant to the possibility of fraud by reviewing your payment card statements for any unauthorized activity. You should immediately report any unauthorized charges to your card issuer because payment card rules generally provide that cardholders are not responsible for unauthorized charges reported in a timely manner. The phone number to call is usually on the back of your payment card. Please see the section that follows this notice for additional steps you may take.
What We Are Doing
On behalf of franchisees, IHG has been working closely with the payment card networks as well as with the cyber security firm to confirm that the malware has been eradicated and evaluate ways for franchisees to enhance security measures. Law enforcement also has been notified.
For More Information
We regret any inconvenience this may have caused. If you have questions, and reside in the United States, please call 855-330-6367 from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. ET, Monday to Friday. If you reside outside the United States, please call 800-290-9989 from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. ET, Monday to Friday.
More information on ways to protect yourself
We remind you it is always advisable to be vigilant for incidents of fraud or identity theft by reviewing your account statements and free credit reports for any unauthorized activity. You may obtain a copy of your credit report, free of charge, once every 12 months from each of the three nationwide credit reporting companies. To order your annual free credit report, please visit www.annualcreditreport.com or call toll free at 1-877-322-8228. Contact information for the three nationwide credit reporting companies is as follows:
TransUnion
Phone: 800-916-8800
P.O. Box 2000
Chester, PA 19016
www.transunion.com
If you believe you are the victim of identity theft or have reason to believe your personal information has been misused, you should immediately contact the Federal Trade Commission and/or the Attorney General’s office in California. You can obtain information from these sources about steps an individual can take to avoid identity theft as well as information about fraud alerts and security freezes. You should also contact your local law enforcement authorities and file a police report. Obtain a copy of the police report in case you are asked to provide copies to creditors to correct your records. Contact information for the Federal Trade Commission is as follows:
Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Response Center, 600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20580, 1-877-IDTHEFT (438-4338), www.ftc.gov/idtheft
By Philip Rucker and Karen DeYoung April 20 at 10:34 PM
An Egyptian American charity worker who was imprisoned in Cairo for three years and became the global face of Egypt’s brutal crackdown on civil society returned home to the United States late Thursday after the Trump administration quietly negotiated her release.
President Trump and his aides worked for several weeks with Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi to secure the freedom of Aya Hijazi, 30, a U.S. citizen, as well as her husband, Mohamed Hassanein, who is Egyptian, and four other humanitarian workers. Trump dispatched a U.S. government aircraft to Cairo to bring Hijazi and her family to Washington.
Hijazi, who grew up in Falls Church, Va., and graduated from George Mason University, was working in Cairo with the Belady Foundation, which she and her husband established as a haven and rehabilitation center for street children in Cairo.
Rates of sexually transmitted diseases are on the rise in New Jersey, and the state Health Department is spending $4.4 million on a campaign to reverse what is a national trend.
At a budget hearing Thursday, Health Commissioner Cathleen Bennett said New Jersey’s campaign includes testing, treatment, outreach to providers – and primary prevention through social media campaigns, where younger people absorb information.
“One in two sexually active 15- to 25-year-olds will get an STD unless they take action to prevent it,” Bennett said.
Senator Jeff Van Drew, D-Cape May, called that statistic unbelievable – but wasn’t surprised, given conversations he’s had with younger patients in his job as a dentist.
“Not from a moral judgmental point of view but just from a health point of view, you know, try to scare the bejeebees out of them a little bit,” Van Drew said.
Millenials watch a video calling on the millennial generation to help end the problem of extreme poverty around the globe at the IMF/World Bank Group’s Spring summit on April 10, 2014. Miguel Juarez Lugo / Zuma Press file
By his twenties, Kyle Kaylor imagined he would be living on his own, nearing a college degree, and on his way to a job that fulfilled him.
Instead, at 21, he found himself out of school, living with his parents, and “stuck” working as a manager at a fast food restaurant scraping to make hand-to-mouth.
Launching into adulthood has been tricky, he said.
“It became too difficult financially to be in school and not working,” says Kaylor, who dropped out of Lincoln Christian University, in Illinois, after one semester because of a money crunch. “And without schooling, you can’t get a job that you can survive on, so I had to move back home,” he said.
By Adam Clark and Carla Astudillo | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
on April 20, 2017 at 4:03 PM, updated April 20, 2017 at 4:38 PM
TRENTON — The median salary among New Jersey teachers is $66,117 this school year, about a 2.4 percent increase from last year, according to new state data.
The statistic reflects a wide range of teacher salaries that vary from district to district based on regional cost of living, grade levels offered in the district, faculty experience and other factors.
Northern Valley, a regional high school district in an affluent part of Bergen County, has the highest median teacher salary, $105,650. That’s more than twice the $43,911 median salary in East Newark Borough, a tiny K-8 district in a low-income area.
Use the tool at the bottom of this story to lookup any district or charter school and compare it to other districts.
By Samantha Marcus | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
on April 20, 2017 at 6:14 PM, updated April 21, 2017 at 8:14 AM
TRENTON — Another study has found New Jersey’s public pension system is in the worst shape of any state in the nation.
The state’s pension woes helped boost how much money public pension systems across the U.S. have on hand versus how much they need to pay for future benefits to $1.1 trillion in 2015, the Pew Charitable Trusts said in its annual accounting of nationwide pension debts.
The figure, known as the unfunded liability, may hit $1.3 trillion in 2016, once the complete data for all 230 public-sector retirement plans becomes available, the study, released Thursday, found.
“Investment returns that fell short of expectations proved to be the largest contributor to the worsening fiscal position, with median overall returns of 3.6 percent,” Pew’s researchers said.
Pension plans in the 50 states added $157 billion in new unfunded liabilities from 2014 to 2015, though much of the increase was driven by the notoriously unstable pension funds in just five states — New Jersey, Illinois, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Connecticut.
From 2014 to 2015, the year Pew reviewed, New Jersey’s pension debt rose from $113.1 billion to $135.7 billion.
The Garden State held enough assets to cover just 37.5 percent of its liabilities in 2015, enough to earn the title of worst-funded in the U.S.
It’s the second report putting New Jersey at the bottom. A Bloomberg study did the same in November. In 2014, New Jersey was No. 48 in the Pew study, with Kentucky and Illinois in worse shape.
Ridgewood NJ, Ridgewood Train Station Station: Stairs Serving Pedestrian Tunnel Closed Temporarily for Roof Replacement Work – Beginning Monday, April, 24, 2017
Beginning on or about Monday, April 24 and continuing for approximately six weeks, the stair kiosks to/from the pedestrian underpass at Ridgewood Station between East Ridgewood Avenue and Wilsey Square will be closed temporarily for repair work.
The underpass and ramps to the south that serve the pedestrian underpass will remain open during this time.This closure is necessary to accommodate roof replacement work on the two endpoint roof structures over the staircases that serve the pedestrian underpass.For your safety, please follow directional signs and do not travel through barricaded areas.
The Ridgewood Police and New Jersey Transit apologize in advance for any inconvenience.
For further information, please call NJ TRANSIT Customer Service at (973) 275-5555 between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and 5 p.m. daily.
Ridgewood NJ, An early Thursday morning, 04/20, two (2) vehicle crash at the intersection of Linwood and North Maple Avenues in Ridgewood resulted in one (1) person sustaining a life threatening head injury and closed a portion of North Maple Avenue for approximately three (3) hours while RIdgewood PD conducted an accident investigation. The seriously injured victim was reportedly taken by ambulance to Hackensack University Medical Center’s main campus. No further details about the crash are currently available.
As a member of the Citizens Safety board, I can tell you we and the police and the town are well aware of how dangerous that particular corner is. Additionally, I was the safety chairperson for BF for a long time. Roseanne is a dedicated employee and has literally risked her life many times crossing those kids. People drive through there in criminal fashion – speeding and flagrantly ignoring her. Speeding cars cut it so close and fast they have even clipped her STOP sign while it’s in her hand! I’ve stood there in the morning observing and she does not haplessly waddle, nor does the job render her out of breath.
If anything, it is HER corner that is dangerous enough to warrant extra manpower. True accidents do happen, and it’s tragic, but I often wonder about the people who drive that carelessly. I wonder if they think about the fact that their desperate need to pick a few seconds or minutes to get where they are going could result in the the knowledge – for the rest of their lives- that they killed another human being.
file photo by Boyd Loving
APRIL 17, 2017 / RANDALL ELIASON
U.S. Senator Robert Menendez is facing trial this fall on corruption charges. His lawyers will claim the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the Bob McDonnell case means the charges against Menendez cannot stand. But the effect of the McDonnell case on the Bob Menendez trial is likely to be pretty limited.
New Jersey Democrat Menendez and his co-defendant Dr. Salomon Melgen were indicted in April 2015. (You can find my detailed analysis of the indictment here.) The case has been on hold for two years while Menendez pursued claims that his prosecution is barred by the Constitution’s Speech or Debate clause. The trial court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit rejected those arguments. The Supreme Court recently declined to hear his appeal, finally clearing the way for the case to go to trial.
But while Menendez was pursing his Speech or Debate appeals, the U.S. Supreme Court decided McDonnell v. United States. The Court reversed the convictions of the former governor of Virginia, holding that McDonnell did not perform “official acts” as defined by federal bribery law.
Nicholas Pugliese , State House Bureau, @nickpugzPublished 5:27 p.m. ET April 19, 2017
Several of New Jersey’s high-ranking elected officials gathered in Newark Penn Station Wednesday to present the federal government with a dire warning: either follow through on a commitment to fund a portion of the $24 billion trans-Hudson rail project known as Gateway or, in the words of U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, prepare for “traffic Armageddon.”
“We are in a state of crisis,” said Booker, a Democrat. “In fact, we are long past a state of crisis and New Jersey residents are feeling it just about every single day.”
Gateway, perceived as one of the most important infrastructure projects in the country, would double rail capacity between Newark and New York City by digging a new rail tunnel under the Hudson River and upgrading aging bridges, among other improvements.
But it’s a race against time. The current two-track tunnel under the Hudson River was badly damaged during Superstorm Sandy and will need to be repaired in the next 20 years, reducing train service by 75 percent.
Ridgewood NJ , the website NICHE issued report cards on places to live in New Jersey. The website says ,the 2017 Best Places to Live ranking provides a comprehensive assessment of the overall livability of an area. This grade takes into account several key factors of a location, including the quality of local schools, crime rates, housing trends, employment statistics, and access to amenities in an attempt to measure the overall quality of an area.
Ridgewood came in 7th with neighbors Glen Rock 11th and Ho Ho Kus came in at number 20.
#7 Works Here: Ridgewood is a great town for young adults to raise their children. Ridgewood is a very tight knit community where everyone helps out and knows one another. The center of town has a good amount of shops and top rated restaurants in the county which attracts a very positive ribe throughout the town. Ridgewood residents are great supporters of the local businesses. Also, young children used the center of town as a safe haven to meet up with friends. They utilize the shops, restaurants, and movie theater; everything is within walking distance! Ridgewood has a fantastic school system that challenges students and allows for high college acceptance rates. The faulty is outstanding and does not leave anyone behind. Ridgewood’s school system also offers a wide variety of afterschool activities for the children, including camps at the town pool! Overall Ridgewood is an outstanding town and a wonderful community for families to grow.
# 11 Current Resident:GR is a great little town- close to NYC & culture, easy access to mountains & the beach. Pretty streets & houses, nice people, & a cute little downtown. You know everyone & they know you (the +/- of such a small town). A bit insane for sports & academics. Students feel pressured to succeed/excel, but there is lots of support to help you. Kids from GR go to a wide variety of excellent colleges, but not many to the Ivy’s.
#20 Niche User:As a long time NJ resident we looked closely at every town in Northern NJ and HHK had the best of everything we were looking for. The schools were great, lots of well educated families, a town you could walk to, great restaurants, the ability to get really involved in the town or not at all and reasonable taxes compared to the rest of Bergen County. After 6 years of living here my wife and I agree this is the best town to live in and raise a family.
