Superior Court Judge Mary C. Jacobson dismissed the long-standing Bacon lawsuit last week. According to Board of Education President Isaac Zlatkin, the Board authorized the Education Law Center in Newark to continue the Bacon litigation on its behalf at no cost to the district, in an attempt to force the State to meet its obligations and provide funding for the benefit of all students in Lakewood, as well as the other Plaintiff districts and others similarly situated throughout the State of New Jersey.
Specifically, the Lakewood Board of Education sought a court order from Judge Jacobsen to enforce a 2009 DOE Determination of Needs for Lakewood.
A verified complaint was filed in Mercer County Superior Court on September 8, 2014 on behalf of the Lakewood BOE to “Enforce Agency Determination.” Lawyers for the BOE sought full state funding, the elimination of courtesy busing and the reallocation of local funds towards the educational needs of the public school students, because the 2009 Agency Determination found it “unacceptable for the district to allege critical unmet needs for its public school students while it spends such a substantial sum of money to provide a non-mandated courtesy service to its nonpublic students.”
The 2009 Agency Determination the BOE sought to enforce in its verified complaint concluded that “the Lakewood School District, while facing significant challenges, could do significantly more with the funds currently available to it. The district must find ways to ensure that its resources are directed to meet the instructional needs of its students. In particular, the district’s long-standing policy of providing courtesy busing must be given serious reconsideration.
In addition, the district should continue to develop strategies to educate more of its special education students in-district. There are many areas in which Lakewood needs to improve in terms of student performance, but the district also has significant resources to address those needs. The Department will assist the district, as described above, to ensure that the educational needs of the district’s students take precedence.”
The Determination of Needs can be found at: http://www.edlawcenter.org/cases/bacon-overview/needs-assessments.html
The BOE complaint and State’s motion to dismiss can be found at: http://www.edlawcenter.org/cases/bacon-overview/bacon-legal-archives.html
[TLS]
this article is incredibly confusing. how about rewriting it?
This lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice. The district lost big time our only hope now is that Aaron Lang Esq wins his lawsuit. And the board starts listening to him.
“… In particular, the district’s long-standing policy of providing courtesy busing must be given serious reconsideration…” In other words, if Lakewood stops the courtesy busing the BOE would have much more money to spend on the education of the children.
BOE’s incompetence is beyond belief. Did they even know what the needs assessment said about Lakewood?
Please read the complaint and needs assessments cited above. After all we went through last summer, had the case not been dismissed, courtesy bussing would have been eliminated.
You cannot fool all the people all the time.
district doesn’t have to give up courtesy busing…the needs assesment is just a recomendation and is not binding..in fact Lakewood has already recieved over 10 million based on this bacon suit back in 2010/2011 and NO courtesy busing was cut. This law suit was to restore that funding that Lakewood has already recieved.
The board members must swallow their pride and ask Aaron Lang Esquire for guidance, and must truly do what is best for the Lakewood school system and the Tzibur.
The BOE needed Inselbauch back!!
the bigger question here that no one has answered is- where does 130 million taxpayer dollars that the BOE receives, disappear to????? does anyone have anything to say regarding this? Thank you
The 2006 State Board of Education Decision on the ELC site had the following quote.
“The ALJ found, and the Commissioner agreed, that the community was capable of supporting education to a greater degree and that the Lakewood Board could not claim to need more funding when it routinely chose to use substantial funds for courtesy busing for a large non-public school population rather than for addressing pressing facilities and programmatic needs.”
What exactly was the BOE thinking when it tried to bring this case back to court?
#6 The only district that received extra funding as a result of Bacon was Millville, which was granted Abbott status in 2002. Lakewood never received extra funding.
130 million doesnt disappear . You can spend 20 minutes reading the budget and you will see where the money goes . A big chunk 9 over 40 million ) is in the form of State and Federal grants that is distributed per pupil both public and private for textbooks,technology ,title 1 special ed etc .. That leaves about 87 million that is brought in from our tax dollars . Of that money , about 25 million goes for special ed tuition for several hundred severe special needs children and and another approx 20 million goes for both public and non public busing . The rest goes to educate the 5000 public school kids .