January 27, 1988|By Chris Panzetta, Special to The Inquirer
By tomorrow night, Merchantville may be one step closer to withdrawing its students from Pennsauken High School.
The Merchantville Board of Education, during a special public meeting scheduled for 7:30 p.m., is expected to consider a consultant’s study examining a proposal to transfer about 100 of the borough’s students to the smaller, more prestigious Haddonfield Memorial High School.
The meeting will be held at the Merchantville Elementary School.
Since October, members of the Merchantville board have repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction with the quality of education their students have been receiving at Pennsauken High. The board’s sentiments have created a furor in Pennsauken, a sprawling township that nearly surrounds the tiny borough of Merchantville.
Pennsauken school officials have vowed to fight Merchantville’s attempts to send its students across town lines to Haddonfield. Merchantville’s teenagers began attending Pennsauken High in 1971. Merchantville High School closed in 1972.
If approved by the Merchantville board, the transfer proposal would require the blessing of the New Jersey Department of Education, which governs relationships between sending and receiving school districts. Maureen Keller, an examiner with the department’s Office of Controversies and Disputes, said last week that the Merchantville proposal would be reviewed only if an official complaint was filed.
The Merchantville board’s consultant, Robert Savitt, of Guidelines Inc., of Great Neck, N.Y., refused to comment on a published report indicating that his study would give the board a green light to move ahead with the transfer.
According to the reports, Savitt concluded that Merchantville’s proposal meets the state’s strict guidelines for permitting a sending district to transfer its students to another system.
Although a 1986 state law made it easier for a sending district to change its students’ destination, Merchantville still must prove that busing its children to Haddonfield will not hurt Pennsauken financially or educationally nor adversely tilt the district’s racial balance.
In an interview Monday, Savitt said that he had not yet determined the
financial, racial or educational impact of the proposed transfer on Pennsauken. He said that Merchantville students might benefit from attending a smaller school such as Haddonfield High, which has an enrollment of 645 students. Pennsauken High has an enrollment of approximately 1,500.
