In a wide ranging report on June 11, South Orange-Maplewood Superintendent of Schools Jason Bing once again warned families about the district’s dire financial situation, while defending changes to the curriculum and next year’s bell schedule, touting improvements through Freshman Academy — and refuting assertions that the Arts are being sacrificed for new career pathways courses.
“Despite staffing adjustments, I want to reassure everybody, this district will remain an Arts district. We have cut no Arts programs, none for the ’26-’27 budget. If you’ve read any of my memos, you’ll see that I used the word ‘yet,‘” he said. “So for the ’26-27 budget, we did not have to cut any programming through the list of about 10 strategic moves that we made to close our budget gap. We did make staffing changes. We had eight reductions in force at the high school level. I believe two were English; one was art at the middle school level.”
Bing said as the district begins the process for the 2027-28 school year budget, leaders and the community are having much needed difficult conversations, and things will get worse if state and federal funding doesn’t improve.
Supt. Jason Bing said as the district begins the process for the 2027-28 school year budget, leaders and the community are having hard conversations, and things will get worse if state and federal funding doesn’t improve.
“We are anticipating an even larger impact, similar to what you were seeing in districts around us. So I want to emphasize that we are already starting with an $8.8-million gap that is not anticipating a boiler breaking down in one of our buildings during the upcoming school year. That is not anticipating a possible rise in healthcare costs, in energy costs. As we work through our numbers, we utilize a pretty strict formula. For every million [dollars] you’re looking at about 12 to 13 staff members. If you’re looking at ’28-’29 [school year], we’re anticipating a $13-million gap. If we push out to ’29-’30, we are anticipating a $17-million gap for our budget. This is taking into consideration that we have a 2% cap. We’ve been advocating for the state to change that.”
The Board of Education meeting room was packed with students, parents and teachers, most of them there to advocate for arts programming and object to the RIFs and the reassignment of teachers, the removal of some art classes and music technology as electives for ninth grade. Others were there to question next year’s bell schedule and staff transfers, including that of a Maplewood Middle School art teacher.
Bing showed a slide that outlined changes in art at every level of education, saying that every elementary school maintains a full-time certified art teacher, and middle school art will remain the same except students do not have a choice every year – “every student will be exposed to all related arts options during their middle school career.” At CHS, some arts pathways will culminate in an industry certification.
“As I noted previously, we cannot run this district anymore with staff that do not have full schedules. It’s just not possible. Every elementary still maintains a full-time certified art teacher,” said Bing.
Bing also showed a slide that compared Columbia High School arts engagement to the statewide average, which he said is part of the district’s visual arts “dashboard” of data.
“We are not hiding anything. We are not secretly trying to get rid of Arts. I think I read that quote somewhere. Here’s the public data. I’m showing it to you,” he told the audience. “This is an Arts district. We are not tearing down the Arts.”
Bing said the decision regarding which courses to offer was “was driven by our budget data enrollment.”
“If courses were not enrolled, those courses were eliminated from the program of study,” he said. “So right now at the high school, we have a minimum of 17 [students] in classes. You want to run a class at the high school, there needs to be 17 kids. We cannot run classes of eight anymore. That’s impossible for us to do.”
Some parents and students who spoke suggested the reduced class sizes in some arts classes were “manufactured” by the district by not allowing freshman to take them and that if freshman can’t take certain art courses in the future, more could be cut.
“Ms. [Alexandra] Paholke is being let go due to low enrollment that is the result of freshmen only being able to take Art 1, TV production, dance or music for their elective, meaning that Ms. Paholke’s drawing class and others, like ceramics and photography, have had low enrollment this year,” said senior Z Hunt, an artist who is headed in the fall to Pratt. “It’s frustrating that you are letting someone go partially because of circumstances that you created.”
In his report, Bing touched on other topics including next year’s bell schedule, student mental health and the success of the Freshman Academy, which he said should lead to an improved graduation rate, which has fallen to 88%.
“We are not meeting the state graduation rate,” he said. “I am not talking about the achieving gaps that we’ve had for decades in this district that we are also working on currently. This is not our African American-Latino rates, which is also below the state rate. This is the entire high school. We are one of the most affluent districts in the state, and we cannot meet the minimum high school graduation rates of the state. That is one of the reasons why we put the Freshman Academy in place.”
Bing presented this chart outlining the successes year over year for the Freshman Academy and said that one of the reasons for starting the academy was to improve the graduation rate, which is currently below state average.
The bell schedule for next year, which has a lot of students and parents concerned, including one student who told the board that he has a petition with more than 400 names of students who oppose it and science teachers who said the schedule reduces class or lab time and therefore students will learn less before they have to take their AP exams.
In his report, Bing said the “drop” schedule, which is similar to the schedule used in neighboring districts, was a response to student stress and will “alleviate some of the workload on our students moving forward.”
“That was a big issue amongst our AP and honor students when we surveyed them — the heavy workload. So this new schedule alleviate that. Students will not have, for example, five AP classes in one day,” Bing said, adding that the change of start and stop times also was done with student mental health in mind.
Mental health screenings and placements for long-term care for mental health have “skyrocketed,” he said, as have cases of self harm, so the district will institute universal opt-in mental health screenings for students next year.
“As you all know, this has been a national issue. I can tell you our numbers by looking at them, are quite more than the national average and quite more than our districts around us,” he said. “So we have made mental health a priority moving forward. We reduced nothing from our mental health lines, no social workers, no programming. We want to support our students moving forward.”
Graduating Olivia Welch told the Board of Education that she doesn’t beleive she would be graduating without the art classes she took during her time in the district.
Some students said the Arts are key to maintaining mental health.
Graduating senior Olivia Welch told Bing and the Board that even with mental health resources, it was a ceramics class in the second semester of her sophomore year that helped her the most when she was dealing with severe anxiety.
“It truly became one of the only reasons I was even motivated to go to school, and I genuinely do not believe that I would be graduating on Wednesday if I didn’t have the art classes throughout my time in this district,” Welch said. “As we know, it is impossible to know what students are carrying with them when they walk into school every morning. … I am begging you to remember that art is not an extra. It should be a top priority. And for many students, it is a lifeline.”
Watch Bing’s full presentation here:
Below is the meeting video, the public speaks portion starts at 1:52:00.
