Redistrict and move on

The Freehold Regional High School District superintendent of schools has proposed a redistricting plan that the Board of Education is expected to discuss on June 3 and vote on at its June 10 meeting.

If the plan is approved, students from Englishtown and sections of Marlboro, Manalapan and Howell will be assigned to new high schools for 2003-07.

The board has discussed the redistricting issue since January and has held numerous public meetings throughout the district to solicit public input.

It is time for the issue to be closed and for the board to put a plan in place to relieve overcrowding at Manalapan and Marlboro high schools, and to accommodate all of the students from Howell who cannot possibly attend the high school in their community.

The board has the right to draw the district’s attendance area boundaries as it sees fit and to assign students to a school in a manner that best suits the needs of the district as a whole.

There are several components of the proposed plan that are sure to draw the most comment from members of the public. Specifical-ly, these components call for high school students from Englishtown to be assigned to Freehold Town-ship High School; for high school students from southern Manalapan to be assigned to Freehold Town-ship; and for high school students from a section of Marlboro to be assigned to Colts Neck High School.

In recent months, some residents and elected officials from Manalapan and Marlboro have said they did not want children from their communities assigned to a high school in another town.

Demographics make it necessary for that to occur.

Parents who do not agree with the redistricting have every right to pull their children out of the district and send them to a private school.

Of course, since there are no private high schools in Manal-apan or Marlboro, their children will have to go a high school in another town anyway.

Some members of the public in Manalapan and Marlboro have suggested that elected officials look into withdrawing from the FRHSD. We support the right of any community to look into withdrawing from the high school district and would suggest that this can be accomplished without animosity on either side.

Times change, and the regional high school district that was formed in the 1950s to serve eight communities may not be the ideal situation in this day and age for all eight towns.

Reasonable people can make decisions and arrangements that will work for both sides.

Answers to the question of whether pulling out of the district will best serve a town’s children are apparently still being developed in some of the constituent communities.

We cannot let pass without comment one final shot at Free-hold Borough High School that the district’s proposed attendance plan takes.

After a subcommittee initially determined there was capacity at Freehold Borough to accept students from parts of Manalapan and Marlboro, administrators seem to have concluded there is not enough room at the school.

In our opinion, this is an attempt to appease some residents of Manalapan and Marl-boro who vehemently objected to having their children assigned to Freehold Borough and to instead reassign children from those two towns only to the more palatable — to those residents — Freehold Township and Colts Neck high schools.