Planners OK Breza Road as school site BY JANE MEGGITT Staff Writer UPPER FREEHOLD - Building a school on Breza Road would be consistent with the township's master plan. The Planning Board agreed at its March 8 meeting to give the Upper Freehold Regional Board of Education a statutory letter affirming that the new proposed site for the middle school is in accordance with the township's master plan. The state Department of Education will receive the letter, according to Board of Education President Joseph Stampe. In a December 2004 school referendum, voters approved the construction of a new middle school on Ellisdale Road. However, due to the site's soil remediation and wastewater management issues, construction has still not begun. The Board of Education voted in February to pose a second referendum for the project on April 17. The referendum will ask voters to approve an additional $13.2 million for school costs and to move the construction of the school to a Breza Road site, which is in a sewerage area. Stampe said the school board has contracted with a company to do soil testing on the Breza Road site as per N.J. Schools Construction Corp. (SCC) requirements. He said the Board of Education's environmental engineers already reviewed seven soil samples taken at the site by New York City's Rockefeller Group, which previously wanted to develop warehouses there. Stampe said the preliminary reports are clear, but those tests are 3 years old and SCC requires new sampling. The Board of Education should have an updated soil sampling report by March 28, and the information will be available to the public before the April 17 referendum, according to Stampe. As for a timeline on acquiring the land at Breza Road, Stampe said the Board of Education is working with the landowner. "I believe we are very close," he said. Architect David Fraytak described the proposed Breza Road site for the Planning Board. He said it is off Route 524 and is part of a contiguous lot on Breza Road that goes to the Allentown sewerage treatment plant. A new 36-foot-wide access road would have to be created over a stream crossing for entering and exiting the school site. The bridge's construction will require a general permit from the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) for wetlands crossings, he said. Fraytak said that DEP official Rick Brown had stated at a meeting the previous evening that it should not be a difficult permit to acquire. Fraytak said there is the possibility of building an access road that links to Breza Road in the future, but that doing so would rely on the future landowner of adjacent property. "We would like to see an additional means of egress from the school," he said. "There is only one now." Fraytak said that the school would not tie in to the Allentown sewer plant and that studies would have to be done for the exact location of wastewater disposal fields for the building. Township Engineer Glenn Gerken noted that Colts Neck High School had to build its own wastewater treatment plant and chose a cyclet, or gray-water, system. Fraytak said the gray-water system is more expensive than the technology the Upper Freehold Regional School District (UFRSD) is considering. "If the percs and soil tests are not acceptable here, we will look at gray-water systems," he said. Board member Richard Bullock asked if the school district did a study on whether school buses would travel to the end of High Street and through Allentown to get to the Breza Road site. Fraytak said the school district did not do a traffic study specifically for the Breza Road site, but that the majority of traffic that would have traveled to the Ellisdale Road site would keep the same traffic pattern for Breza Road. "Studies done for Ellisdale would be similar, if not identical," he said. Stampe also addressed talk in the community of building a high school instead of a middle school. He called the idea of needing a high school "ludicrous." The current elementary/middle school was designed to hold 700 students, according to Stampe, and the annex on that campus can hold an additional 225. He said there are now 1,209 students in the elementary/middle school. Allentown High School can hold 1,600 students, he said, and the present enrollment is 1,100. Stampe said that the Board of Education intends to do long-term demographic planning. He said the numbers from its 2003 demographic study are off, considering that housing development in the area has slowed down. "You all know the availability of land in the sewer service area in Upper Freehold," he told the Planning Board. Stampe said a high school could not be built on the 118-acre Breza Road property, but an elementary school could go there. Once a middle school is built on the property, the school district would have 68 buildable acres left there due to environmental constraints. Since the middle school issue has taken up so much of the school board's time, it has not been able to do long-range planning, according to Stampe. The UFRSD has been without a permanent superintendent since Robert Connelly left in August 2005. Maybeth Conway, the district's longtime assistant superintendent and curriculum director, recently announced she will be leaving as of Aug. 31. The 2006 New Jersey School Report Card test results showed that the number of students with advanced skills in the school district was below average for its District Factor Group (DFG). The DFG measures a district's socioeconomic status, ranging from an A for the poorest districts to a J for the wealthiest. The Upper Freehold Regional School District is rated a GH.