Bid Notice-RFP for N. Walnut St. Redevelopment Area
REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS
Proposals will be received by the Village of Ridgewood, in the Level 4 Courtroom, at the Village Hall, 131 North Maple Avenue, Ridgewood, New Jersey, and will be opened on Monday, December 1, 2014 at 10:00 a.m. prevailing time for:
“Request for Proposals and Qualifications
for the
Development of the North Walnut Street Redevelopment Area
Village of Ridgewood Bergen County, New Jersey”
The Village of Ridgewood is seeking proposals from qualified firms to redevelop certain parcels in the North Walnut Street Redevelopment Area in conformance with the Village’s adopted Redevelopment Plan.
The RFP package may be obtained from the Office of the Village Manager, Level 5, Village Hall, 131 North Maple Avenue, Ridgewood, New Jersey 07450, (201) 670-5500, extension No. 203. Proposal packages may be examined or picked up in person between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m., at 131 North Maple Avenue, Ridgewood, New Jersey 07450, Monday through Friday. Prospective respondents requesting that proposal documents be mailed to them shall be responsible for providing their own postage/delivery service remuneration. No proposal forms shall be given out after 4:00 p.m. on Wednesday, November 26, 2014.
Proposals may be submitted in person or by mail prior to the proposal opening, addressed to the Office of the Village Clerk. The Village assumes no responsibility for loss or non-delivery of any proposal sent to it prior to the date and time stated for receipt of proposals.
Each proposal must be enclosed in a sealed envelope with the name of the respondent thereon and endorsed, “Request for Proposals and Qualifications for the Development of the North Walnut Street Redevelopment Area, Village of Ridgewood, Bergen County, New Jersey”.
All respondents shall present satisfactory evidence of being authorized to do business in the State of New Jersey. All respondents shall also provide a copy of their New Jersey Business Registration Certificate with their proposal. Additional requirements for submittal are presented in the RFP. All respondents shall adhere to the requirements presented in the “Request for Proposals”. The Village of Ridgewood reserves the right to reject any or all proposals, to waive any informality or to accept a proposal, which in its judgment best serves the interest of the Village.
Reader , Thank heavens for the eminently qualified and blessedly plain-spoken Stanford professor James Milgram, who places the blame for this recurring nightmare right where it belongs: the ossified, math-allergic minds of this country’s education school faculties. If the husband-wife reform math zealots had safely touched down in the Ridgewood district’s superintendent’s office, as had been the plan before local parents merely suggested a conflict of interest with similarly off-kilter textbook publishers like Pearson, Ridgewood would now be a Botsford-powered Mecca for Common Core adherents looking for leadership in how to deprive high-potential students of decent foundations in math achievement.
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COMMON CORE BLOCKBUSTER: MATHEMATICIAN DR. JIM MILGRAM WARNS COMMON CORE WILL DESTROY AMERICA’S STANDING IN TECHNOLOGY
During a Friday conference call sponsored by Texas-based Women on the Wall, Stanford mathematician and former member of the Common Core Validation Committee Dr. James Milgram, told listeners that if the controversial standards are not repealed, America’s place as a competitor in the technology industry will ultimately be severely undermined.
“In the future, if we want to work with the top level people, we’re going to have to go to China or Japan or Korea… and that’s the future we’re looking at,” Milgram said during the call that was part of a day-long Twitter campaign to target Indiana Gov. Mike Pence’s (R) decision merely to “rebrand” the Common Core standards in his state, even though he has a Republican supermajority in the legislature and an appointed state board of education.
Pence was in Dallas Friday for Americans for Prosperity’s Defending the American Dream summit, considered to be an essential stop for presidential hopefuls.
In less than 40 minutes, Milgram floored listeners with information about the Common Core standards, how they will affect the nation’s students and, ultimately, the country itself, and what parents and citizens can do to try to stop them. Listen to the podcast in full below:
Milgram began by addressing the reason why he was on the call: to let Pence know that his “rebrand” of the Common Core was a betrayal of Indiana’s citizens.
Born and raised in Indiana himself, Milgram that it was important to him as a fellow Hoosier that the state do a decent job with replacement standards after repealing the Common Core.
“The state actually paid me to evaluate new standards,” he said about his involvement in the review process.
The Stanford professor then explained to listeners a key reason why the Common Core standards will prevent students from moving into STEM careers.
Milgram said he was “incredibly disappointed that the drafts I was reading [of Indiana’s new standards] looked so much like the Common Core,” but was nevertheless happy to see that advanced math classes like pre-calculus, calculus, and trigonometry were left into the replacement standards.
“These were very well-done and absolutely impossible to teach if all these kids had were Core standards,” Milgram explained. “It was a complete disaster because even the things that they added—that were of high quality—were added to standards that couldn’t support them.”
Milgram described his experience in the 1990s when he was asked to assist with a project that would replace California’s “disastrous” education standards. The mathematician said he strongly recommended that students in the 8th grade take Algebra and that his recommendation was heeded.
From the time the new standards were put in place and until the time of the adoption of Common Core standards in California in 2010, Milgram said two-thirds of the students in the state were taking Algebra in the 8th grade and doing well, with over half of them at least proficient or above.
Milgram said this piece of information is critical because it showed that it was possible for almost every student to handle Algebra in the 8th grade.
“The group that made by far the most progress were the minorities – blacks and Hispanics – who had essentially been written off by the system,” Milgram explained, and then went on to reveal how the fact that challenging minority students – resulting in their increased performance – was a threat to faculty in universities.
“So, their numbers were increasing dramatically and I frankly think that the… faculty in the education schools throughout the country actually got extremely scared by this,” he continued, “because it contradicted everything that they’ve been telling us for the past hundred years about how education works and what one can expect and how one should train teachers.”
Milgram asserted that a strong education in mathematics is essential for success.
“If you don’t have a strong background in mathematics then your most likely career path is into places like McDonald’s,” he said. “In today’s world… the most critical component of opening doors for students is without any question some expertise in mathematics.”
Milgram explained that in the high-achieving countries, where about a third of the population of the world outside the United States is located, about 90 percent of citizens have a high school degree for which the requirements include at least one course in calculus.
“That’s what they [sic] know,” he said. “If we’re lucky, we [sic] know Algebra II. With Algebra II as background, only one in 50 people will ever get a college degree in STEM.”
Milgram warned that with the Common Core standards, unless U.S. students are able to afford exclusive private high school educations that are more challenging, they will be disadvantaged.
“This shows that, from my perspective, Common Core does not come close to the rhetoric that surrounds it,” he continued. “It doesn’t even begin to approach the issues that it was supposedly designed to attack. The things it does are completely distinct from what needs to be done.”
Milgram said, in California, they were able to deal with the problem of their poor academic standards in the 1990s because the curriculum was controlled by the state and the high-tech industry in Silicon Valley threatened to move all its research and manufacturing elsewhere if the problem was not addressed.
“The curricula we were fighting then… they’re back!” he announced. “We are hearing exactly the same kind of things now with Common Core as we heard back in the ’90s!”
“How can you have mathematics problems that don’t have a single answer or correct answer – any answer is correct?” Milgram asked. “Well, of course the answer is mathematically you can’t, and all of this is just a repeat of what went on 20 years ago in California – but this time, it’s national.”
“This time I don’t see any uniform or systematic way of getting rid of it,” Milgram said. “The only way you’re going to get rid of it is state by state and parent group by parent group. And if you’re lucky, industry will join you because high tech is ever a more important part of our economy.”
The bad news, according to Milgram, is that, returning to his experience in California in the ’90s, if students had been in that system with the older, poor standards for three or four years, “the damage couldn’t be undone,” he said.
“All of this should really make you angry at the people who are responsible,” Milgram said, directing himself squarely to the parents listening to him. “And the people who are responsible – I’m going to be blunt about it – are the people in the education schools – they’re the ones who had the ultimate say about all of this and they’re the ones whose beliefs are driving it.”
Milgram explained that a uniform perspective exists on issues in education and what is important to achieve among a vast majority of the faculty in schools of education. Because of this, he said, the same types of standards always come back.
“You must go after the schools of education and the faculty of these schools,” Milgram urged.
Asked about the fact that many industrial giants and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce actually support the Common Core standards, Milgram responded that in the ’90s, research centers in this country were still very much needed. Now, however, he noted that most of the research in top-level firms has moved out of the U.S. IBM’s main research center, he observed, is in India, and other companies have moved their research centers to Russia, Korea, and China.
“Even Microsoft has moved its software development to Beijing,” Milgram noted. The founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, is the primary source of private funding of the Common Core standards.
“Production and manufacturing has also moved out of this country,” Milgram added. “The longer this continues, the more we’ll see our major industry move over to other countries and the jobs they generate will go with them.” Send
Labor Day stems from deadly labor strike, but few Americans know the history
A labor movement in Chicago in 1894 left 30 Pullman workers dead, and later spurred Congress and President Grover Cleveland to pass a bill creating Labor Day. But the history of this holiday is rarely taught in schools, and there are few full-time labor journalists to write about working class communities.
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Sunday, August 31, 2014, 7:31 PM
WASHINGTON — Monday is the day to celebrate the American worker and his sacrifices and economic and social achievements.
You do know that, right?
If you don’t, you’re not alone.
Few recall the bloodstained origins of this holiday as we fire up the grill, throw on the burgers and dogs and turn on the U.S. Open tennis or maybe the Yanks, Mets or another ballgame.
And, in a sign of the times, the Sunday morning network news shows didn’t even offer their usual, token pre-Labor Day weekend spot for the head of the nation’s labor movement.
“No,” said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka when I asked him. “No invitations this year.”
I told the former mine worker-turned-lawyer that there seems to be a precious lack of understanding of the holiday’s origins.
In fact, it stems from an awful confrontation in Chicago in 1894 that saw federal marshals and the Army kill 30 striking Pullman railroad strikers.
Foreclosures prompt lawsuits against debt collectors
AUGUST 31, 2014 LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, AUGUST 31, 2014, 1:21 AM BY RICHARD NEWMAN STAFF WRITER THE RECORD
* Homeowners challenging lenders’ right to collect
Seven years after the meltdown of the subprime mortgage market, New Jersey continues to be a hotbed of home repossessions by lenders, resulting in reams of foreclosure-fraud and improper-debt-collection complaints that mainly target intermediaries known as mortgage servicers.
Fort Lee homeowner Eun Ju Song, who was notified last year that he was in default on his loan and is facing foreclosure, claims mortgage companies botched transfers of ownership rights to the mortgage he signed in 2006 and forged documents to try to fix the problem. In a federal lawsuit filed in Newark in May against Bank of America and the mortgage servicer Green Tree Servicing, he claimed that they haven’t shown they have any legal right to collect.
“With no properly recorded owner of the plaintiff’s mortgage, there is no one or entity entitled to enforce the conditions of the mortgage obligation,” the complaint says.
Jerry K. Wong of Clifton filed a lawsuit in May against Green Tree, which for the past couple of years has been one the most prolific foreclosure filers in the state. Wong accuses Green Tree, based in St. Paul, Minn., and one of its subcontractors of misrepresenting themselves as creditors when trying to collect on his loan, which went into default in late 2012. Such practices are a violation of the federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, according to the lawsuit, which seeks $500,000 in statutory and other damages.
Green Tree did not respond to requests for comment.
In West Milford, homeowner Paul Onder has been in a stand-off with the Utah-based debt collector Select Portfolio Services for four years over the same question: Who owns the mortgage? He said he hasn’t made a payment on his $450,000 debt consolidation loan since 2010.
“They want me to pay money? Where is that money going?” he said Wednesday in an interview.
SPS could not be reached for comment.
Disputes like these could multiply in the months ahead as the numbers of new residential foreclosure filings continue to rise. New filings in New Jersey in the 12 months ended June 30 climbed 38 percent, to 47,534 filings from 34,347 the previous 12 months, according to the New Jersey Administrative Office of the Courts in Trenton.
In the year ended June 30, 2012, there were 12,341 foreclosures filed.
Foreclosure filings have implications for borrowers’ credit history. Realtor.com says a foreclosure will reduce a credit score 100 to 300 points and will remain on the borrower’s record for seven years.
Statistics from the state Department of Banking and Insurance show that loan servicers Wells Fargo, Green Tree, Seterus and Nationstar Mortgage have racked up the biggest numbers of foreclosure filings. Wells Fargo and its affiliates made the most filings by far, with a combined 1,770 new foreclosure filings in the second quarter.
“The trend we are seeing with regard to foreclosure filings in New Jersey is consistent with what the Mortgage Bankers Association reported in their latest National Delinquency Survey,” Kevin Friedlander, a Wells Fargo spokesman, said in an email.
Road Warrior: How to make your teen a near-perfect driver
AUGUST 31, 2014 LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, AUGUST 31, 2014, 1:21 AM BY JOHN CICHOWSKI THE RECORD
If you’re a parent who pounds your foot on an imaginary brake while teaching your teen to drive, you might be happy to know that your frantic mentoring will likely pay huge personal dividends — assuming you’re a good role model behind the wheel.
With schools getting ready to open any day, that was the message delivered last week when a New Jersey highway safety official presented preliminary findings in a slide show that detailed near-perfect road records for teens whose parents learn about Graduated Driver License laws, then follow up by closely monitoring their kids’ driving behavior.
When parents got involved in their training, 98 percent of these young people didn’t get traffic tickets and 92 percent didn’t crash their cars in their first year behind the wheel, said Violet Marrero of the state Division of Highway Traffic Safety. Past national studies have suggested that parental involvement can cut teen crash risk in half — not by 92 percent, a figure Marrero called “phenomenal.”
“We lost about 800 teens in car crashes in New Jersey over the last 10 years,” she told a crowd at Westfield High School on Tuesday. “Imagine the impact on the community if all parents got involved and we could spare the grief of at least half that number of families.”
The audience, composed of more than 100 high school driver-education instructors, gave the division’s special project manager a warm hand. For more than a decade, many of New Jersey’s 3,000 instructors have been complaining about steadily eroding resources for equipment like the driving simulators that are needed to train young people for an activity that takes the lives of more 16-to-20-year-olds than any disease.
The teachers are familiar with the grisly statistics: Although young drivers represent only 6 percent of the state’s population, they accounted for 14 percent of all road deaths from 2003 to 2012, mainly due to inexperience.
Teachers also know of an effective treatment: Graduated Driver License mandates that protect novices for at least one year while they learn the road’s hard lessons. Under New Jersey’s 13-year-old program, that means an 11 p.m. driving curfew, a limit of one teen passenger if a licensed adult is not in the car, a ban on plea-bargaining when sentenced for driving offenses, and a ban on all wireless devices in the car. New Jersey is also the only state to require display of a tiny red license-plate decal to identify permit holders and first-year probationary licensees.
“We’re finally seeing some meaningful change,” said Maureen Nussman, a former Kinnelon High School teacher who organized the event with the New Jersey Teen Safe Driving Coalition, New Jersey Manufacturers Insurance and the New Jersey Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance (njahperd.org).
Statistically, New Jersey’s Graduated Driver License requirements appear to be working, especially after the decal, curfew and passenger requirements were tightened in a law that took effect in 2010. Fatalities involving drivers 20 years old or younger have fallen every year but two in the last 10 years — from 103 in 2004, to 46 in 2013, according to a Highway Traffic Safety Division analysis. This 55 percent drop is three times greater than the decline for all other age groups combined.
– See more at: https://www.northjersey.com/news/nj-state-news/parents-are-key-to-safe-teen-driving-1.1078605#sthash.d4LTH5yP.dpuf
One giant leap: Whale sightings off Jersey Shore up dramatically
AUGUST 29, 2014, 7:26 PM LAST UPDATED: FRIDAY, AUGUST 29, 2014, 10:34 PM BY SCOTT FALLON STAFF WRITER THE RECORD
While it hasn’t become Cape Cod just yet, the number of whale sightings around New Jersey has increased substantially this year, suggesting that the state’s coastal waters are now clean enough to sustain humpbacks, finbacks and other species during their feeding season.
Since April, dozens of whales have been spotted from Sandy Hook to Cape May chasing down schools of small fish sometimes within a mile of New Jersey’s shoreline.
“They seem to be staying in the same area all season long, which is something we haven’t really seen before,” said Amy Bergeron, a marine biologist with the Cape May Whale Watch and Research Center, which runs tours along New Jersey’s southern coast. “Some are not even a mile out. We know they come here for the food, and you’re seeing huge batches of bait fish close to the shore.”
As of last week, the Cape May center had 37 whale sightings, compared with 15 through October last year. And Gotham Whale Watch, a group of “citizen scientists” who catalog marine mammals in New York and as far south as Monmouth County, has reported 57 whale sightings so far up from 43 in 2013.
The news has drawn thousands onto whale-watching boats hoping to see the majestic mammals gliding through the ocean and perhaps even glimpse a humpback leaping out of the water. It has also prompted authorities to issue alerts to boaters fearing whales are coming too close to shore.
Academics are treating the reports cautiously, since most of the sightings come from groups associated with local whale-watching boats. But some environmental officials and marine biologists say the reports should be taken seriously.
“It’s tough to definitively say there are more whales in an area without more baseline information,” said Jackie Toth Sullivan, a marine mammal scientist and adjunct professor at Richard Stockton College. “That being said, an increase certainly seems plausible given the amount of anecdotal reports coming in from boaters, whale-watching boats and beachgoers alike this season.”
Beginning in April, thousands of humpback whales usually pass New Jersey dozens of miles off the coast during their annual migration up the East Coast from their winter mating and birthing grounds in the West Indies. Many congregate around Cape Cod to feed on the abundant sea life near a large underwater plateau in Massachusetts Bay or head farther into the North Atlantic for food.
Cleaner waters affect the bottom of the food chain allowing plankton to flourish closer to shore. That in turn provides a food source for small bait fish like menhaden. And whales like nothing more than to scoop a school of menhaden into their mouths for lunch.
Even though an estimated 23 billion gallons of raw sewage spills from hundreds of outfall pipes into New Jersey’s rivers and bays each year, the state’s coastal waters are considered the cleanest they have been in decades.
New Jersey ranked third in best water quality out of 30 states last year with 3 percent of water samples exceeding pollution standards, according to a report by the National Resource Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group.
– See more at: https://www.northjersey.com/news/one-giant-leap-whale-sightings-off-jersey-shore-up-dramatically-1.1078310#sthash.SJTBWb7q.dpuf
Ridgweood school board names new business administrators
AUGUST 29, 2014 LAST UPDATED: FRIDAY, AUGUST 29, 2014, 12:31 AM BY JODI WEINBERGER STAFF WRITER
A former school district employee will return to the Ridgewood Board of Education (BOE) as its business administrator in the coming months.
On Aug. 25, the BOE approved the hire of Alfredo Aguilar as the district’s business administrator, with a contract lasting through June 30, 2015. Aguilar will be paid an annual salary of $168,000.
Although Aguilar was unanimously approved to hire, he will remain in his current position, as the business administrator for the Pascack Valley Regional High School District, for 90 days or until a replacement is found.
In the interim, assistant business administrator Gertrude Engle has been named acting business administrator and will receive a stipend of $250 per day.
Aguilar previously served as the business administrator for the Oradell Board of Education and from 2009 to 2012 was the assistant business administrator in Ridgewood.
From 2004 to 2009, Aguilar was a middle school math teacher in Paterson Public Schools and from 2001 to 2004 was a financial services officer in the U.S. Air Force.
AUGUST 25, 2014 LAST UPDATED: MONDAY, AUGUST 25, 2014, 1:21 AM BY CHRIS HARRIS STAFF WRITER THE RECORD Print
RIDGEWOOD — Officials have notified the owners of six residential properties, deemed to be abandoned, that they need to make improvements to them soon or the village will take action.
Some of the properties have been on the village’s radar for more than a decade.
One of the homes, on Daniel Court, has become the residence of raccoons and other wildlife, officials said.
Councilwoman Gwenn Hauck read through the list after saying that village officials have twice notified the properties’ owners with “the reasons why they have met the abandoned property criteria.”
The village has requested these owners “work with [officials] on a rehabilitation plan,” Hauck said.
The properties on the village’s abandoned homes list include the modern town house on Daniel Court, whose door is covered with shut-off notices from Ridgewood Water; a shuttered and neglected ranch on Fairway Road; and a dingy but otherwise prim two-story home on North Monroe Street.
The properties do not appear to be occupied. Knocks on doors were not answered, and calls to the last known owners were unreturned.
The Village Council in June adopted the state’s “Abandoned Property and Rehabilitation Act” as part of Ridgewood’s own village code.
According to the state, an “abandoned” property is most often defined as “any property that has not been legally occupied for a period of six months.”
Such homes must also either be in need of rehabilitation or determined by a public officer to be a “public nuisance.”
We thought it could be instructive to review the Bergen County Budget which is $507 million + for fiscal 2014.
What are the county’s largest capital expenses? Keep in mind these costs are for projects with a projected completion of 2014-2019. If the projects miss the deadline, costs will increase.
Roads and bridges $88,125,000
Improvements to county buildings $13,937,450
Improvements to vocational schools $11,655,000
Improvements to county parks $11,598,500
Acquisition of equipment $30,183,250
Improvements to county college $8,625,000
Justice Center improvements $41,031,000
Hospital improvements $17,100,000
Total funding capital expenses $222,255,200
Where else does our tax money go? Additional expenses include:
Bergen County Debt Service (interest payments for previous expenses) is $67,566,670
Operations $401,601,228.66
Capital improvement $1,476,068
Deferred charges and statutory expenses (i.e. pension plan payments) $37,034,173
By Michelle Jamrisko and Ilan Kolet Aug 18, 2014 6:01 AM ET
The cost of higher education has jumped more than 13-fold in records dating to 1978, illustrating bloated tuition costs even as enrollment slows and graduates struggle to land jobs.
The CHART OF THE DAY shows that tuition expenses have ballooned 1,225 percent in the 36-year period, compared with a 634 percent rise in medical costs and a 279 percent increase in the consumer price index.
Some for-profit schools such as Corinthian Colleges Inc. have collapsed amid enhanced federal scrutiny, and three of the nine worst performers in the Russell 3000 index (RAY) are education companies. Yet university degrees are hardly on sale. The student loan debt burden threatens to overwhelm younger Americans, who already are finding a tougher labor market compared with their older counterparts.
“Some schools are effectively limiting cost increases by bigger tuition discounting, but on the whole college presidents have not adjusted to a fundamental shift in attitudes toward the value of a high-cost education,” said Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity in Washington. “Colleges are too slow to reinvent themselves,” particularly as enrollments are waning, said Vedder, who is a Bloomberg View contributor.
Maybe Johnny Can’t Read Because These Workers Crowd Out Teachers
Kelsey Harkness / @kelseyjharkness / August 13, 2014
Teachers and other staff hold a ‘back to school’ meeting at K.W. Barrett Elementary School in Arlington, Va. (Photo: K.W. Barrett/Creative Commons)
Half of America’s public school employees aren’t classroom teachers, according to a new study. Instead, they’re non-teaching personnel such as instructional aides, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, secretaries, and librarians.
It hasn’t always been this way.
The study from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a nonprofit think tank specializing in education policy, found that the number of non-teaching staff grew by 130 percent from 1970 to 2010. Their salaries and benefits account for one-quarter of current education spending.
To show where each state is on the spectrum between least and most non-teaching personnel per 1,000 students, Fordham created this map:
Chart: Thomas B. Fordham Institute
So why are non-teachers on the rise? The Fordham Institute left that up to school district and state education officials to explain.
By using national, state, and local data, though, “The Hidden Half: School Employees Who Don’t Teach” attempts to draw attention to what some education experts consider an alarming trend.
By a wide margin, Nevada and South Carolina public schools had the fewest non-teaching workers per 1,000 students, at 26 and 28 respectively, the study found. Virginia, Vermont, and Wyoming had the most at 104, as the chart below shows.
Lindsey Burke, the Will Skillman Fellow in education policy at The Heritage Foundation, argues for reducing the number of non-instructional and administrative positions in public schools:
States should consider cutting costs in areas that are long overdue for reform and pursue systemic reform to improve student achievement. Specifically, states should refrain from continuing to increase the number of non-teaching staff in public schools.
Michael Petrilli, president of the Fordham Institute, told The Daily Signal that the results of the study should encourage policymakers to “raise tough questions about whether these trends are helping or hurting children.”
Among the most significant findings of “The Hidden Half’,” the authors say in a release on the study:
Since 1950, school staffing has increased nearly 400 percent, and non-teaching personnel played a major part in that growth. Passage of several pieces of federal legislation — Section 504, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, and Title IX (Equal Opportunity in Education Act) — likely were instrumental in changing the makeup of schools.
America spends far more on non-teaching staff (as a percentage of education spending) than do most of the nation’s economic peers in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The U.S. spends more than double what Korea, Mexico, Finland, Portugal, Ireland, Luxembourg, Austria, and Spain do. Only Denmark spends more.
States vary in staffing their schools, but much of the variation is because of differences within their borders. States with a large proportion of the population living in cities tend to have fewer workers per student. (See chart below.) The category of teacher aides has been the largest gainer over the past 40 years. From 1970 to 2010, aides went from nearly non-existent to the largest group of workers other than teachers.
School districts vary greatly in number of employees, but the differences likely stem from staffing decisions made by leaders. Although factors such as location (rural, suburban, urban) and number of students in special education matter, they don’t explain most of the variation across school districts.
It’s time to pull the plug on our turf fields. The locations are not conducive to turf material. With the over $100,000 in repairs we could take that money to go back to grass. The money we have spent in fixing each if these damaged episodes could have been used for another employee or two in our maintenance dept which is short employees (our town’s landscape is falling apart and w the taxes we pay, our town should be looking well attended and it’s not!! The best landscaped areas are the ones donated by kind vendors, not our village tax dollars.). What about the Schedler property for turf, or Habernickel Farm, or Citizens park or one of the elementary schools that don’t flood?
AUGUST 10, 2014 LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, AUGUST 10, 2014, 1:21 AM BY JENNIFER V. HUGHES SPECIAL TO THE RECORD THE RECORD
In the past few years, members of the Kaiser family have radically transformed the back yard of their Ho-Ho-Kus home, starting with a patio, a deck and a built-in barbecue.
Drainage projects came next, followed by additional plantings, exterior lighting and, finally, a full-sized pool.
“My husband likes to grill and I like not to cook,” said Michelle Kaiser, who said their three teenagers adore the pool and their extended family from the city loves to visit the great outdoors. “As the years have gone by, we’ve been able to make it into the space that we really love and really can use.”
Creating outdoor living spaces is one of the hottest trends in landscape architecture, local and national experts say.
“There is a real focus on the exterior of your home,” said Mark Borst, owner of Allendale-based Borst Landscape & Design, which did the project on the Kaiser home. “It’s almost like creating a different room for your house. It’s about the barbecue, outdoor rooms that have a roof but open sides, a fireplace. There are outdoor TVs with surround sound. Everything you think of normally having inside is creeping outside.”
