AroUND toWN School district to develop new 5-year strategic plan

The Robbinsville Public School District is developing a five-year strategic plan with direct guidance from the community.

Nearly 60 volunteers have already signed up to participate in the detailed process, facilitated by the New Jersey Schools Boards Association.

“We are conducting a robust, collaborative, stakeholder-engaged strategic planning process,” said Superintendent Brian Betze. “A critical aspect of the strategic planning process is the involvement of a cross-section of district stakeholders. They will share their unique perspective about where they want the school district headed over the next five years.”

This Strategic Plan Working Group is tasked with developing long-term goals and objectives for the school district, focusing on the many strengths of the Robbinsville schools, the challenges they face and the ideas and hopes the community has for its students. A key goal is enhancing college and career readiness for all Robbinsville students.

Membership of the group includes Betze, district teachers, administrators, support staff, parents, community members and students.

The group will meet in-person four times: Tuesday, January 31 from 6-7:30 p.m., Wednesday, February 15 from 6-7:30 p.m., Wednesday, March 15 from 6-7:30 p.m. and Monday, April 3 from 6-7 p.m. The meetings will take place at various schools in the district.

“Betze, who has undertaken similar strategic plans in other school districts, expects the plan will have plenty of specifics in the first year,” said a school district news release. “But then, over the course of the following years, the plan is intentionally designed to be much more flexible, with the ability to easily adjust to new opportunities and challenges.”

Betze said the district underwent a similar process before the pandemic, but the school officials were eager to start fresh with a new five-year plan due to remote learning and other challenges caused by the COVID crisis.

The plan is expected to be ready for presentation to the school board by its July meeting for review and adoption.

Flag football registration open for area children

Robbinsville residents have an opportunity to sign their children up for flag football in an area league. Registration is now open for the Hightstown East Windsor Youth Baseball League’s Spring 2023 flag football season.

HEWYBL is open to boys and girls from all area towns, and has both co-ed teams and all-girls teams.

HEWYBL Flag Football is open to players who will be in grades K-9 this spring. The registration deadline is March 15 and the season will run from early April to early June. Games will be played in East Windsor.

HEWYBL flag football typically draws players from Allentown, Cranbury, East Windsor, Hamilton, Hightstown, Millstone, Robbinsville, West Windsor and other surrounding towns.

Season details can be viewed at www. HEWYBL.com. To register, go to www. HEWYBL.com and select REGISTER at the upper right-hand corner. For more information about HEWYBL Flag Football or the upcoming season, email hewyblflag@gmail.com.

Socks donated

The Rotary Club of Robbinsville Hamilton Rotary teamed up with the PTAs at Pond Road Middle School and Sharon School’s Sharon Shines initiative to sponsor the “Socktober” sock drive for the month of October.

Through the combined effort, 2,715 pairs of socks were donated to benefit local organizations, including Womanspace, the Trenton Rescue Mission and Salvation Army.

The township sent out special thanks to Chris Merlino (Rotary Club vice president and “Socktober” event chair), and Danielle Liegl, the Sharon PTA president.

We are a newsroom of your neighbors. The Robbinsville Advance is for local people, by local people. As part of the community, the Gazette does more than just report the news—it connects businesses with their customers, organizations with their members and neighbors with one another. As such, our staff sets out to make our town a closer place by giving readers a reliable source to turn to when they want to know what’s going on in their neighborhood.

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A proud member of: told to have voters do this after the township received a directive by the Office of the Superintendent of Elections when the problem with the voting machines first arose.

However, it now appears that the Board of Elections considered signing the book as a machine vote, even though no vote was actually cast on the machine, only via a provisional ballot, Fried explained. “As a result, those votes—and we don’t have any idea right now how many— were disqualified and those voters were unmistakably disenfranchised.”

Most of those discounted ballots appear to have been cast within the first two hours of the polls opening at 6 a.m.

The township said that Mercer County Superintendent of Elections Nathaniel Walker confirmed in an email to the township clerk’s office that the problem could not be reversed because the election has been certified.

Walker and the Board of Elections did not respond to requests by the Advance for comment on the problem and how widespread the issue was.

“We believe even one uncounted vote is too many, let alone hundreds,” Fried said. “Robbinsville has been among the most vocal critics of the 2022 General Election in Mercer County and has called for a complete overhaul of the process. Brian M. Hughes, the Mercer County executive, has done the same. However, it is patently false for anyone at county to state that every vote was counted. We now know that is, sadly, not true.”

This is where you’ll savor life to the fullest. All in an area known for its wealth of cultural offerings, recreational opportunities, dining and shopping. Vintage at Hamilton is in the center of it all, close to I-195 and the New Jersey Turnpike and just minutes from the Hamilton Train with direct service to New York City and Philadelphia.

He added: “We have repeatedly expressed our dismay with the unfortunate events surrounding the 2022 General Election, and we will not stop until fundamental changes are made to our election systems in Mercer County.”

The problem with the machines on election day meant that voters had to submit their choices via paper ballots and sharpies. The problem was discovered by poll workers shortly after the polls opened.

Mercer County Prosecutor Angelo Onofri has said that the results of an investigation by his office found no evidence of wrongdoing, and that the problem was caused by a coding error when the ballots were printed. Those codes had not been programmed into the machines.

Mercer County Clerk Paula Sollami Covello had called for an investigation after the Election Day problems to determine “whether this scanning problem occurred based on an error or whether something was intentionally done to create chaos and distrust in the election system.”

DINE & DONATE

In

Years

2023

UPCOMING CHARITABLE EVENTS:

MARCH 12: Hamilton YMCA

APRIL 16: Unity Tour

MAY 21: Miracle League

JUNE 11: NJ Autism

JULY 9: Joeys Little Angels

AUGUST 6: Whats My Name

SEPTEMBER 10: Ryans Quest

OCTOBER 8: I Believe in Pink

NOVEMBER 12: Shine & Inspire

DECEMBER 10: OneProjectNJ & Mobile Meals of Hamilton when the organization became the free public library, and Ferdinand W. Roebling served as its first board president.

Please consider visiting the websites of these organizations for additional donation opportunities!

The library board purchased the property that had housed the street’s namesake, the Trenton Academy, since 1782, and hired architect Spencer Roberts. Roberts (1873-1958) was a Philadelphiabased architect who had attended Spring Garden Institute and worked for prominent architect Frank Miles Day.

The Trenton library building is an example of the popular Beaux-Arts design popular during the period that has also been dubbed the American Renaissance.

As “Public Art in New Jersey” author Thomas C. Folk notes, the style, “which dominated much of American artistic and intellectual life from the 1870s to the 1920s, existed as both a reality and a mental construct. Not specifically a style or a movement in the commonly accepted art historical sense of those terms, the American Renaissance was more a mood, or a spirit, or a state of mind.”

In addition to encompassing “many diverse idioms of painting, architecture, and sculpture,” the style also “had a broad base of support with many politicians, financiers, businessmen, academics, and men and women of the American middle class. As an idea or mental concept, the American Renaissance held both nationalistic and cosmopolitan ideals and looked to the past and the future.”

The building also hits another historic note for what it is not. As a library history reports, “Contrary to popular belief, the new library was not a Carnegie Library. Between 1883 and 1929, businessman Andrew Carnegie donated funds to construct over 2,500 libraries, but certain cities like Trenton and Newark felt that accepting this money would show that they were unable to provide for themselves.”

The current Lawrence Library is located in a building that was formerly a massive trucking terminal, but its history goes back to 1960, when a group of township residents gathered more than 1,600 signatures on a petition demanding a branch library.

According to Lawrence historian Dennis Waters, the residents’ request was finally approved in 1961, and that year, the Lawrence branch opened in a small 1,600-square-foot space at the rear of Dunham’s department store in the newlyopened Lawrence Shopping Center. It was an awkward location because it was not accessible from the main parking lot in front.

For the next 20 years, the Lawrence branch remained at the shopping center location, though it moved several times and gradually increased in size.

As time wore on, Lawrence residents grew increasingly unhappy with the size and services offered by the library.

In 1978 the Lawrence Township Library Committee commissioned a report to study the feasibility of leaving the county system and establishing a townshipoperated municipal library, as Hopewell Township had recently done. The report advised against leaving the county system, and the Library Committee accepted its recommendation.

However, the Mercer County Library System recognized that it needed a major upgrade, so during the period from 1979 to 1982 it began planning an expansion that would bring new library buildings to all of its member municipalities.

In particular, it planned a facility in Lawrence that would serve as the system’s headquarters and include a muchenlarged reference department. Financing was provided by the Mercer County Improvement Authority through a $10 million bond issue.

The site chosen for the Lawrence Headquarters Branch was 12 acres at the corner of Darrah Lane and Brunswick Pike. The site contained an abandoned trucking terminal that was originally built in 1953 for Riss Brothers, at that time one of the largest trucking companies in the eastern United States. The property was subdivided, with Lawrence Township receiving the western section, where the Senior Center now stands.

The trucking terminal was very well constructed, so it was decided to renovate it rather than tear it down and start over. Renovation began in the spring of 1983 and on April 7 of the following year it opened.

At more than 40,000 square feet, the branch was five times the size of the branch in the shopping center that it replaced, although some of that space was used by the county system for its headquarters, which moved from Ewing.

In 1994 the MCIA borrowed $15 million to fund another upgrade of the library system, including a 17,000-square -foot expansion at the rear and the west end of the existing building, providing an expanded reference section, additional community meeting rooms, and new offices for the headquarters staff, whose former offices became the fiction department “downstairs.” * * *

The Hopewell Public Library at 13 East Broad Street is housed in the red brick building that once upon a time had been the Hopewell National Bank.

While the current Hopewell library company was founded in 1914, there had been some sort of book or material lending system established as far back as

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