Democrats Sweeney and Prieto will pursue individual approaches to funding reform
Get ready to hear a lot more about school funding in New Jersey.
This week will start what could amount to nine separate public hearings in the next month about the state of school funding for New Jersey’s public schools, all driven by the somewhat fractured Democratic leadership of the Legislature.
The first is scheduled for today before the Joint Committee for the Public Schools, a hearing that has long been on the docket.
The next day will be the initial hearing before the Assembly’s education committee at 10 a.m. on Wednesday in the State House. Another is planned before a new Senate select committee next week, on January 27, at Kingsway Regional High School in Woolwich at 11 a.m. The next three have yet to be scheduled.
And this is all before Gov. Chris Christie unveils his state budget for fiscal 2017, in which a third of state spending will be aid to schools. It’s anyone’s guess as to what he will put forward.
Christie has been pushing to scuttle the state’s current formula-driven funding plan, instead providing the same amount of state aid per pupil for every district, no matter the need.
Ridgewood NJ, Intensifying his Administration’s commitment in the fight against substance abuse, Governor Chris Christie today signed Executive Order 219 declaring the opioid epidemic a public health crisis in New Jersey. The action requires the marshalling of all appropriate resources to combat its harmful effects on state citizens.
“We must take aggressive action to get this insidious crisis under control so I am calling together all resources of state government in order to save lives,” said Governor Christie. “The human cost of this epidemic is incalculable, impacting every part of life in New Jersey, affecting our education system, our health care system, public safety and the financial security of every person it touches.”
According to the U.S. Surgeon General, an American dies every 19 minutes from an opioid or heroin overdose. New Jersey’s drug overdose death rate increased by almost 22 percent between 2014 and 2015. There was a 30 percent increase in heroin deaths over the previous year and triple the number of deaths caused by the synthetic opioid fentanyl. Additionally, the CDC reports that in 2012, health care providers wrote 259 million prescriptions for opioid pain medication, enough for every adult in the United States to have a bottle of pills.
The new Executive Order creates the Governor’s Task Force on Drug Abuse Control, to be headed by Charlie McKenna, Executive Director of the New Jersey Schools Development Authority, which will be charged with developing and executing a comprehensive, coordinated strategy to combat the drug-abuse epidemic by working with all areas of state government, in addition to local, federal, and private entities, as well as the Facing Addiction Task Force.
The Drug Abuse Task Force will consist of eight members, including the Attorney General and the Commissioners of Health, Human Services, Corrections, Education, Children and Families, and Banking and Insurance.
The Task Force will review current statutes and regulations that present barriers to individuals suffering from addiction to receiving treatment from rapid opiate detox centers and make recommendations to rescind or amend any such statutes or regulations to remove those barriers. The panel is authorized to call upon any department, office, division, or agency of this state to supply it with information, personnel, or other assistance available as the Task Force deems necessary to discharge its duties. The Task Force may consult with experts or other knowledgeable individuals in the public or private sector on any aspect of its mission.
The Executive Order also directs Attorney General Chris Porrino to take all necessary steps to limit the initial prescription of opioids for acute pain and establish standards such that additional quantities may only be prescribed after further consultation with the patient.
The Order further directs Department of Children and Families Commissioner Allison Blake to ensure residential substance abuse disease treatment facilities and similar facilities utilize their existing spaces effectively, including ensuring that 18 and 19-year-olds with substance abuse problems are able to take advantage of any vacancies in existing facilities wherever appropriate.
In addition, the Governor is directing Acting Education Commissioner Kimberley Harrington to develop a new, comprehensive grade-specific curriculum to educate children about the dangers of substance abuse.
“Opioid drug abuse is one of the most challenging issues facing us not only as Americans but as New Jerseyans,” said Governor Christie. “The crisis is pervasive – impacting our families, friends, neighbors and coworkers. The steps I am taking today through this Executive Order recognize the severity of the crisis and pull together the efforts of all state government agencies.”
outright price gouging foisted on commuters too late in the year to explore options in any meaningful way.the eight hour max really shafted those who used coins to do daily commuter payment as option.
Parkmobile means you have to do the 9.55 Parkmobile input from work and test those 8 hours while the Parking police as just laying for those who try to do a just in time on the front or back end of those eight hour max.then you can get a ticket on repeat parking if you try to add an hour buffer later on in the day.
Parkmobile Admin function shows repeat parking to the police.then they write you up on the 8 hour max.meantime you are at work or committing home to move the car to your home.Its all by design folks..the 750/1000 VIP pass extortion for workers who need to take the train where bus is not practical.
Ridgewood NJ, The 2017 Best School Districts ranking is based on rigorous analysis of key statistics and millions of reviews from students and parents using data from the U.S. Department of Education. Ranking factors include state test scores, college readiness, graduation rates, SAT/ACT scores, teacher quality, public school district ratings, and more.
Niche bills itself as a website that helps you discover the schools and neighborhoods that are right for you. We rigorously analyze dozens of public data sets and millions of reviews to produce comprehensive rankings, report cards, and profiles for every K-12 school, college, and neighborhood in the U.S.
Their ranking system assesses 10,364 U.S. public school districts. The same methodology is used to produce the Overall Niche Grade for each ranked school district as well as additional school districts. Statistics obtained from the U.S. Department of Education represent the most recent data available, usually from 2014–2016, as self-reported by the school districts.
They rated Tenafly Public Schools number 6,Fair Lawn School District 15th, Glen Rock Public School District 19th,
Pascack Valley Regional High School District 27, Mahwah Township Public Schools 28,Park Ridge Public Schools 33,Cresskill Public School District 35, and Paramus Public Schools 39.
Their platform was a multifaceted approach. They did discuss tiered parking prices for commuters, one way streets with diagonal parking, a garage, subsidizing Uber, parking apps, possibly using the Zabriskie lot, employee parking, etc. The council discussed the parking rates in October and November, before voting on it. I don’t believe any member of the public complained about the price being tiered higher as you got closer to the train. The Financial Advisory Committee suggested raising the commuter passes as well as the meters, especially the meters on the streets closer to the train station (75 cents and hour was suggested). The council chose to keep the meters the same, except to lower 60 meters at Cottage to 25 cents an hour for CBD employee parking. These were both done to try to entice more people to use the Cottage Street lot, which remains mostly empty all day.
When the previous council was planning a garage, they said the garage would be mostly for patrons of the CBD. They said commuter parking would be on the upper levels.
Say the garage was built at Hudson. If 2 cars started from the same location, one drove directly to the Cottage lot, parked, & walked to the train platform. The other car drove directly to a garage at Hudson Street, drove round and round to the 3rd level, parked, came down to street level, and walked to the train platform- my guess is that the timing would be pretty much the same.
Making good on a promise to slash government, President-elect Trump has asked his incoming team to pursue spending and staffing cuts.
Insiders said that the spending reductions in some departments could go as high as 10 percent and staff cuts to 20 percent, numbers that would rock Washington if he follows through.
At least two so-called “landing teams” in Cabinet agencies have relayed the call for cuts as part of their marching orders to shrink the flab in government.
The cuts would target discretionary spending, not mandated programs such as Medicare or Social Security, the sources said.
If you make the same mistakes in the battles of 2017, populists will win everywhere
YESTERDAY by: Wolfgang Münchau
If you have two strong arguments, the surest way to lose a debate is to add a third one. The superfluous argument of our time is, more often than not, the finger-wagging warning of economic doom.
Starting this week, we need to get our heads around the possibility that US President-elect Donald Trump is simultaneously reprehensible and economically successful — at least for some time. The instinct has often been to conflate political decency and economic efficiency because this is what has been done for such a long time. Fortuitously, our open, liberal systems also happened to be the most efficient. They even produced an acceptable distribution of income until about 10 years ago. Yet the period from 1989 to 2007 was exceptional — history is littered with economically successful dictators and economically disastrous liberal democrats.
You may be in Davos this week, seeking reaffirmation of your deeply held beliefs when you pontificate about the future of the universe. Or you may be on Facebook or Twitter, expressing your fury about where the world is headed. My advice is to narrow your focus.
Brexit is terrible because it deprives young Britons of the right to choose where to live, study and work. It deprives them of a European identity many believed they possessed forever. If this is what upset you about the Leave vote, then you were insane to allow your political campaign to be hijacked by lobbyists who kept whining about the loss of the single European passport for banks. This is the superfluous argument that lost the Brexit referendum. Keep making that same mistake in the battles that loom in 2017 and the populists will win everywhere.
In the month leaded up to the election on November 8th, we repeatedly demonstrated how the mainstream media polls from the likes of ABC/Washington Post, CNN and Reuters repeatedly manipulated their poll samples to engineer their desired results, namely a large Hillary Clinton lead (see “New Podesta Email Exposes Playbook For Rigging Polls Through ‘Oversamples'” and “ABC/Wapo Effectively Admit To Poll Tampering As Hillary’s “Lead” Shrinks To 2-Points”). In fact, just 16 days prior to the election an ABC/Wapo poll showed a 12-point lead for Hillary, a result that obviously turned out to be embarrassingly wrong for the pollsters.
But, proving they still got it, ABC/Washington Post and CNN are out with a pair of polls on Trump’s favorability this morning that sport some of the most egregious “oversamples” we’ve seen. The ABC/Wapo poll showed an 8-point sampling margin for Democrats with only 23% of the results taken from Republicans…
Ridgewood NJ, the Ridgewood blog was shocked to learn ads posted in 20 U.S. cities offer protesters money to disrupt President-elect Trump’s inauguration this week in Washington, D.C. An organization called “Demand Protest” posted the ads on the website Backpage.com. The San Francisco based group is offering people a $2,500.00 monthly retainer and $50/hr during each protest they participate in.
Rising costs are putting basic necessities out of reach for 37 percent or 1.2 million New Jersey households, according to the United Way ALICE Report released by United Way of Northern New Jersey.
“ALICE – Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed; Study of Financial Hardship” shows that the minimum costs to survive in New Jersey rose by 23 percent since 2007, outpacing the rate of inflation of 14 percent. The report finds that it costs a single adult $24,300 to survive annually and $64,176 for a family of four with two children under the age of five.
Ridgewood NJ, so who’s Afraid of Betsy DeVos? “Mrs. Devos’s Most Important Qualification is that She Has the Courage of Her Convictions”, in an editorial the Wall Street Journal attempts to answer the critics and make the case to provide poor children with better educational opportunities. We know the unions don’t like it and neither do Democrat, lawmakers looking to stifle their constituents keeping them fat, dumb and happy. Who’s Afraid of Betsy DeVos?
The Wall Street Journal
Wall Street Journal Opinion
January 14th, 2017 Click Here to Read
Democrats are searching for a cabinet nominee to defeat, and it’s telling that progressive enemy number one is Betsy DeVos. Donald Trump’s choice to run the Education Department has committed the unpardonable sin of devoting much of her fortune to helping poor kids escape failing public schools.
Mrs. DeVos’s most important qualification is that she has the courage of her convictions.
The DeVoses have donated tens of millions of dollars to charity including a children’s hospital in Michigan and an international art competition in Grand Rapids. They’ve also given to Christian organizations, which the left cites as evidence of concealed bigotry. Yet education has been their main philanthropic cause.
During the 1990s, they patronized a private-school scholarship fund for low-income families and championed Michigan’s first charter school law. In 2000 they helped bankroll a voucher initiative, which was defeated by a union blitz. The DeVoses then turned to expanding charters, which have become Exhibit A in the progressive campaign against her.
Two studies from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (2013, 2015) found that students attending Michigan charters gained on average an additional two months of learning every year over their traditional school counterparts. Charter school students in Detroit gained three months.
The real reason unions fear Mrs. DeVos is that she’s a rare reformer who has defeated them politically. Prior to being tapped by Mr. Trump, she chaired the American Federation for Children (AFC), which has helped elect hundreds of legislators across the country who support private school choice.
AFC has built a broad coalition that includes black and Latino Democrats, undercutting the union conceit that vouchers are a GOP plot to destroy public schools. In 2000 four states had private-school choice programs with 29,000 kids. Today, 25 states have vouchers, tax-credit scholarships or education-savings accounts benefitting more than 400,000 students.
You know progressives have lost their moral bearings when they save their most ferocious assault for a woman who wants to provide poor children with the education they need to succeed in America.
Ridgewood NJ, Thursday, January 19th @ 6:00pm Sex Pistol’s Guitarist, STEVE JONES, will sign his new book: Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol ($26.99).
Stephen Philip “Steve” Jones (born 3 September 1955) is an English rock guitarist, singer and actor, best known as a guitarist with the Sex Pistols and Iggy Pop. He was ranked in Rolling Stone’s list of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time”.
Rolling Stone , “As a whole, the book provides a fresh look at the punk movement 40 years removed from the release of Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, and it presents an unflinching, sometimes even uncomfortable self-portrait of Steve Jones. “I did wonder, ‘Do I want to let everyone know this?’ about some of the stuff in there,” he says. “But I decided, ‘Fuck it. Whatever.'”
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The village should not make commuter parking a profit center. People already live in town and pay taxes. Shouldn’t they get something in return?
And once they purchase an overpriced pass don’t play musical chairs with them. A pass should relate to an actual parking spot. Telling someone to leave home earlier just means that a different person will miss out on parking.
I don’t commute by train but it seems like the town is making an unpleasant commute even worse.
There has been a real focus on fees and petty ticketing in town. Are we that desperate for revenue that we go after the taxpayers? This is becoming a petty police state. Where is the quality of life?
Ridgewood NJ, as previously reported a Habernickel Park residents reported that on Saturday night January 14, at 1:30 AM (so by then it was early Sunday morning) loud talking, trucks, and snow blowing was taking place in Habernickel Park. As we all know, it was a light dusting of powdery snow, not a snow storm by any stretch. Most of us got by with doing no shoveling at all, since it was warm today and melted. At best a little salt on the sidewalks at Habernickel would have done the trick, spread by one quiet employee. This could have been done Sunday morning after 6 AM, long before anyone might be walking in the park. Two trucks, two men, loud and obnoxious when people were sleeping. How much did this cost in overtime on a Saturday night??? Could this have been some kind of retribution for the complaints that have come from neighborhood residents over the past year or so regarding Health Barn, safety issues, etc?
