I Welcome Tracy Jordan- In Support of Dr. Janine Caffrey

I welcome a new contributor to my blog, Tracy Jordan. She is a good friend and a passionate resident of Perth Amboy, dedicated to shedding light on this town's many problems. Together we will be creating a new town paper, The Perth Amboy Wave, which will debut in the next 60 days.

I am posting this letter as a relatively new resident of the City of Perth Amboy. I moved here five years ago. I write to express support of Dr. Janine Caffrey, Superintendent of Schools for the Perth Amboy Public Schools for two distinct, yet related, reasons.

First, after attending several Perth Amboy Board of Education meetings, and keeping an eye on the Board of Ed website, Dr. Caffrey has earned my respect as a competent and forward-thinking change maker. She is focused and action-oriented. At the meetings I attended, various staff members presented everything from new curricula and creative teaching methods to meet high academic goals, to tracking databases and increased parental input mechanisms. All of these initiatives are being implemented under the administration of Dr. Caffrey. Frankly, I was very pleasantly surprised and very relieved. This leads me to my second reason.

Up to and including this year, Perth Amboy’s public school system ranked 500 out of 559 in the State of New Jersey (Source: National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Dept of Education, and New Jersey Dept. of Education. Rank score is determined by averaging). I don’t have any children of my own and neither do most of my friends in this town. But that does not mean that I am not affected by the level of performance of our school children. Not at all.

I consider myself to be quite fortunate. I have held good jobs here, I currently own a business and a waterfront home. However, much to my distress, what I have seen over the past five years, is that parents of young children move out of town as the time draws near for their child to enter school. This has happened too many times for me to count. However, my experience has been that long time residents of Perth Amboy do not want to hear that. They supposedly “love” Perth Amboy, insinuating that I must not since I am “so negative.” Imagine all of the parents, or soon to be parents, who never even move here in the first place because the quality of the school system is considered to be substandard. If you don’t think that affects the quality of life of every person in this town, then you need to think again.

This city that I do love needs to break its pattern of poor decision making at critical moments. Ambitious waterfront development plans – scrapped. Five full time economic development jobs merged into one and all left vacant by the retirement of one very overworked woman. The willful disintegration of our Chamber of Commerce. Property assessments conducted by our assessor in a “random” pattern that goes unexplained. The list goes on and on and on.

Now we are faced with the possibility of losing a qualified and effective education administrator. And for what? It is frightening to think that the reason could be that she’s actually implementing the sweeping, dramatic changes needed to overhaul an educational system that languishes in the bottom 10% of the State. I implore the Perth Amboy Board of Education to not take another step backwards at yet another critical moment in the revitalization of Perth Amboy.