The Matzav Shmoooze: Are There Public School Students in Lakewood Who Don’t Belong There?

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Dear [email protected],

I am a father of eight living in Lakewood, NJ.

I would like to share a shocking revelation that I recently discovered. I don’t know how widespread it is or whether this issue has previously been addressed.

I own a company where I employ a number of wonderful, hardworking immigrants, who are here in this country legally. I pay them well, treat them nicely, and have a good rapport with them. I believe that my company makes a kiddush Hashem in the way we treat our employees.

The other day, I was speaking to one of my workers, who I knew had recently moved. I asked him where he was living, and he told me that he had moved to nearby Brick, NJ. I asked him where his children now go to school, and he said that they are still in the Lakewood public schools.

This surprised me, because I was under the impression that a public school student must attend a school that is in his or her township.

My employee told me that he has a number of friends who have also recently moved to nearby municipalities, such as Jackson and Toms River, or Howell, and whose children are still enrolled in the Lakewood School District. [I don’t know how they transport the children to school and things like that.]

I have no way of investigating this, but should this be true, in essence, the Lakewood School District – meaning the tax dollars of Lakewood residents – is paying for the education of children who don’t even live in the district. I never knew this was allowed by the system. Maybe I’m uninformed.

When I asked my employee how he is able to pull this off, he explained that while he lives in Brick, he still has an address of a friend in Lakewood that he uses for school-related matters. He explained that he likes the bi-lingual nature of the Lakewood public school his children attend, so he didn’t want them to leave.

If this phenomenon is widespread, we could be talking about hundreds, perhaps thousands, of students from outside the district attending Lakewood schools on the backs of Lakewood taxpayers.

Some years ago, an idea was floated to require parents to present C of Os in order to enroll their children in school. This would prevent multiple families from using the same Lakewood address as their residence. I don’t know if this makes sense or is feasible, but maybe it is necessary if there are many more people like my employee and his friends.

Most people I know are struggling to make ends meet. Many are paying $9-10,000 in taxes for townhomes. Others are paying upwards of $15,000 in property taxes. If there are students in the public school system who don’t belong there, and they are each costing taxpayers $15,000 a year or whatever tuition is, isn’t this a pressing matter that should immediately be investigated and resolved? Why isn’t there a hue and cry over this?

Can a thorough audit be done to determine how many Lakewood public school students actually live in Lakewood?

Sincerely,

A Hardworking Breadwinner

Lakewood, NJ

{Matzav.com}


12 COMMENTS

  1. Ditto for Lakewood mosdos providing busing for those who moved to Jackson. It is the Lakewood parents who are paying for it while the realtors advertise that taxes are cheaper in Jackson

  2. You are so right. Maybe the BOE of Lakewood will stop sitting on their backs and wake-up to investigate. They are broken in major dept with book money perhaps its time they sent these kids back to their hometowns where they currently live

  3. Dear anonymous, let me confuse you with the facts. Jackson residents whose children get on buses in Lakewood is not costing lakewood a dime. The jackson boe pays lkwd for every child to ride on buses that are stopping anyway near the lkwd jackson border. Please be accurate as misinformation can be harmful to others.

  4. Do you really want to put the Lakewood public schools under the microscope and claim that people from other districts are purposely sending their kids to Lakewood? This person seems like an exception to the rule, where he moved but wanted his child to have the stability of remaining in the same school. Unless you have evidence of this being widespread, it may be better to leave this one.

  5. Can someone confirm or deny how accurate these charges are? Can we at least have an audit of the public school students to determine what’s going on?

  6. AHB has hit the nail on the head!

    I have seen groups of illegal immigrants waiting for school bus pickup on street corners in my frum neighborhood. They obviously so not live anywhere near the pickup location and are coming from somewhere else. You do the math!

    Unfortunately, we have people who need to be extremely careful not to appear as if they are “racists.” If we would have some representation who could speak openly, the 5000 plus population of the Lakewood school system could be halved!

  7. Dave is wrong, you must live locally. An excellent idea to require a CO. Because only one family can show a CO per address it would also prevent (to some degree) us taxpayers paying for kids from multiple families crammed into one unit illigally. This is definitely a real problem, the question really is how widespread is it.
    Don’t hold your breath waiting for an investigation though.

  8. When I saw the title of your article, I thought you might want to talk about the frum children who are in Public School these days…

  9. It makes sense. It does not make any sense to me that the public school population keeps increasing. The Heartstone and Chestnut neighborhoods were full of Hispanic public school kids. Those areas are now almost all frum. Where did the Hispanic families move to? it wasn’t Lakewood. The whole Rt 88 area is turning over.

  10. I always wondered how it could be that the public school population keeps increasing. The areas where they used to live like Heartstone, Chestnut, Rt 88 are almost all frum now. This letter makes sense. What can we do about it?

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