In a special election Tuesday, voters in Collingswood roundly rejected a $44.5-million bond proposal from the borough public school district.
The measure fell by a count of more than two-to-one, with 2,577 “no” votes to 1,105 “yes” votes.
Excluding any provisional or absentee ballots, which have not yet been tabulated, 3,692 ballots were cast, or about one-third of the 11,090 registered voters in Collingswood.
Of those, 1,986 were submitted in person, and another 1,696 were returned by mail. All results are unofficial until certified by the Camden County Clerk.
(By Thursday morning, those counts were updated to 2,642 “no” and 1,152 “yes,” with 10 blank ballots cast of 3,804 total, split 1,808 mail-in and 1,986 at the polling places.)
Had it passed, the referendum would have closed two of five elementary schools in the district in order to acquire the recently shuttered Good Shepherd Regional Catholic School and renovate it as an upper-grade elementary school.
It also would have redistributed students from preschool to third grade at its remaining elementary schools, adding new classrooms and playground surfaces, while renovating athletic facilities at the borough high school.
The Collingswood Board of Education presented its plan in March, months ahead of the vote, to give the community time to contemplate its merits; however, opponents of the referendum used that window to mobilize against it.
Both pro (All in For Collingswood) and anti (Protect Colls Schools) political action committees (PACs) organized within the borough, and the money, like the votes, followed the “no” campaign by a comparable margin ($10,369 to $5,903 total receipts as of September 6 filings with ELEC, the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission).
The campaign was also colored by the involvement of the borough municipal government, which in July urged the borough school board to abandon its proposal and instead seek an operations referendum, all amid a protracted contract negotiation with district teachers.
It also marked the second consecutive school bond referendum that Collingswood Mayor Jim Maley has publicly opposed in the past seven years, a distinction that residents probed in the September 4 meeting of the municipal government.
“We know you’re a no; you have a ‘no’ sign,” Collingswood resident Erica Schmid asked Maley in that meeting.
“You do realize that your position as mayor is a lot more powerful than my yes. Why are you a no?”
“Really because the process has been more than awful,” Maley responded.
The mayor was vocal in his critique of both the process leading up to the release of the referendum and the messaging around it, calling the campaign divisive. He also chalked up disinformation on the tax impact of the bond to the nature of elections.
“There’s misinformation that happens in those, and you just make your arguments, and you work to convince people, and that’s how it goes,” Maley said in the same meeting. “No one gets strung up if there’s any misinformation.”
As the tallies were being finalized Tuesday night, Collingswood Superintendent of Schools Fred McDowell offered a different perspective on the referendum process.
“The fact that we had this much civic engagement is something that was a pleasant surprise for me because that means people care,” McDowell said. “The misinformation, the fear-mongering, the lying to try to tell a narrative that didn’t exist, that’s unfortunate.
“I reject the concept that that’s politics,” he said. “I believe that politics should be for the people and for the truth. All the volunteers that came out to canvass neighborhoods and come to roundtables is a good thing. Friends and neighbors talking about what they want for their kids is always a good thing.”
The superintendent said that although Collingswood voters held different opinions on the proposal, they seemed to agree on the goals of the referendum: grade-level-aligned elementary schools, higher academic achievement, inclusive classrooms, and overhauled athletic facilities.
“The remedy is still unchanged,” McDowell said. “We can continue to pretend that the situations are not the situations, or we can do something about it.”
He said district leaders will “take a pause from the discussion” to re-evaluate what kinds of changes the district can effect for its students, and on what kind of timeline.
“What I can tell you is that the concentrations of poverty is unacceptable, and not something that we can continue to ignore,” McDowell said.
“The lack of inclusive schools is not something that we can continue to ignore. Academic disparities among children who live in different neighborhoods but attend the same school is not something that we can continue to ignore.
“We are not mini-neighborhoods; we are one neighborhood,” he said. “Some of our colleagues and our friends have forgotten that.”
The superintendent was also unsparing in his criticism of residents “holding onto the sentimentality or nostalgia of a foregone era” — i.e., retaining the educational inefficiencies of the current neighborhood elementary school footprint — in the face of needed facilities improvements.
“There’s been unfortunately a divestment in public education in Collingswood,” McDowell said. “We cannot continue to critique the educational services if we are unwilling to invest in educational services.”
Moreover, he said, the longer the borough puts off making necessary infrastructure improvements, the greater the potential cost for repairs in the event that something breaks.
“If we are unwilling to invest in educational facilities, then we cannot complain when facilities that should be here fail and that puts us in an emergent situation where there are no other options,” McDowell said.
