With the rampant governmental infighting about consolidation of school districts, resistance from local school boards, and fiats from the Department of Education, we rarely have the opportunity to get a sense of the mood among actual people. Here’s our chance: the Burlington County Times published an article about the Willingboro public schools that provoked a striking number of responses from readers.

(Caution: the comments include much errant hearsay, particularly that a consolidation with Willingboro and various other districts is in the works, or that merging K-12 districts could be done without a vote from all residents. In fact, Governor Corzine has backpedaled on his original plan for county-wide districts and is now focusing only on non K-12 districts.)

The article itself recounts a new amendment to a policy issued by the Willingboro School Board that restricts extra-curricular programs at the high school to students who attend the school. As Willingboro’s academic reputation has declined, more and more students have started attending Burlington County Institute of Technology, with Willingboro footing the tab. The tweaked policy intends to “entice” students back to Willingboro High School, especially through their popular “Heritage” theater program. The Board president voted against the short-sighted motion, which passed anyway:

Gordon said he felt the board should not penalize the children for decisions made by parents. Instead, he said the district should work to improve its curriculum and use that to entice students back to the high school.

“I think it’s a very dangerous thing for us to be so myopic. If we really want our children to come from BCIT back to Willingboro, taking Heritage (drama program) away is not the way,” Gordon said. “If we want to attract children back to the district, we need to improve the curriculum.”

Scroll down to the bottom of the article and read through the comments; you’ll see the full panoply of arguments both for and against consolidation. We have the Not-In-My-Back-Yard-ers, the racists (Willingboro is largely black and surrounding districts mostly white), anxious types fretting about higher tax rates, academically-oriented advocates of curricular improvement to Willingboro, disparagers of government interference, lower-income residents hoping for school choice. Here we have a microcosm of the battle playing out at every level of New Jersey: home rule vs. consolidation.

The discussion attached to the County Times piece instructively depicts the harsh odds against any intrusion into local control of school districts. Meanwhile, the children unlucky enough to live within the boundaries of Willingboro must now choose between attending the township high school where 63% of the eleventh graders fail the HSPA, or attending the county technical school and doing without extracurricular activities.

New Jersey has the fourth most segregated school system in America. At the heart of this grim truth is our legislative and cultural inability to move beyond the mythology of home rule.