Haddonfield BOE Meets for First Time Since Bancroft Referendum Failed

The Haddonfield Board of Education is scheduled to gather at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the high school library for a regularly scheduled meeting.

The gathering could take on a postmortem air in the wake of the controversial $12.5 Bancroft public purchase referendum defeat on Tuesday. Voters rejected the plan by 251 votes, 2,387 to 2,136, with nearly half of the borough's 9,434 registered voters casting ballots.

The defeat effectively kills the joint public effort by the BOE and borough to buy the 19.2-acre Bancroft property at 425 Kings High School East next to the high school. The school board and the borough saw the property as an oasis of possibilities in this nearly built-out, 300-year-old town. The plan was to acquire it for the expansion of athletic fields, open-space preservation and future school-board use.

Opponents of the plan successfully argued it was too expensive for overburdened tax payers and too vague. The defeat of the referendum could have been turned by residents near Radnor Field, one of several athletic fields scattered around the borough because there is not enough space for them on the high school's main campus.

Residents near Radnor had expressed concerns the field might be sold to residential developers if the BOE built new fields on the Bancroft property. The referendum went down by 218 votes in that district, 629 to 411.

Tonight's agenda includes beginning discussions on the BOE's next budget and a report from Superintendent Richard Perry on Haddonfield school security since the fatal Connecticut school shootings last month.