Princeton school board will hire interim superintendent
The Princeton Public Schools Board of Education will hire an interim superintendent to replace Steve Cochrane when he leaves at the end of June.
School officials said at a virtual school board meeting this past week that they will seek an interim superintendent who can start work on July 1. The board had been considering whether to hire an interim superintendent or a permanent replacement after Cochrane decided to leave the district.
Cochrane announced in late February that he would leave Princeton at the end of the school year. He said he had decided to relocate to the Seattle area where his mother lives.
Cochrane, 60, became the head of the Princeton Public Schools in January of 2014. Previously he was the assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction for the Upper Freehold Regional Public Schools. He began his career in public education as an elementary school teacher in South Brunswick and later served as principal of Hopewell Elementary and Timberlane Middle schools in the Hopewell Valley regional district. Before he began his career in public education, he was an admissions officer and assistant dean of students at Princeton University.
Krystal Knapp is the founding editor of Planet Princeton. Follow her on Twitter @krystalknapp. She can be reached via email at editor AT planetprinceton.com. Send all letters to the editor and press releases to that email address.
It seems like this year will be a good time to talk also about all the cost savings and innovations and learnings that we have all had from home schooling our kids while paying the school taxes and other fees. If our schools are overcrowded and parents want to opt out of say an overcrowded system, why not pay the families who want to opt out of the schools to keep their children either home schooled or in private school? If our schools spend $35,000 per child, rather than spend the money to make more like guidance offices or more fields, more sports fields in the military industrial complex of sports, why not pay those families who are interested in opting out the full $35,000 per child that the system claims for their children? Same for parents who put their children in private school. It has been pretty surprising to watch the schools send the kids home for 6 months while still collecting all the money. Can we at least as a community talk about this? At the end of the day it seems like parents are still really on their own in our society in educating their own. And shouldn’t the finances of our system really reflect this?