New York Times May 31, 2010

HEADLINE: A Private School's Ads Imply Public School Slippage

By Richard Perez-Peña

SADDLE RIVER, N.J. - The mad scramble for places in renowned urban private schools does not apply out here in the well-off suburbs. Parents here tend to think highly of their local public schools, while the nearby private schools often have empty slots and turn away relatively few students.

Still, the suburban private schools, like their city cousins, survive on the qualities that set them apart from public schools: small classes, flexibility, extracurricular activities, sophisticated courses. The differences are so well understood that they are usually not noted.

But for the last few weeks, the Saddle River Day School has been advertising in local newspapers - a departure, in itself, for many private schools - with a pitch subtly pointing out that at a time when New Jersey public schools are cutting back, Saddle River Day is not.

Over a photo of a teacher engaged with a single student, each ad has a headline like "Skimping on science isn't smart," or "Skimping on world language isn't smart." All of them point to the school's low student-teacher ratio and its enviable rate of graduates headed to top colleges.

Budget-cutting in public schools "has sparked me personally and us as a school because what they are cutting is not good for children," said Eileen Lambert, head of school at Saddle River Day.

The ad campaign comes at a moment of paradoxes. The recession that has prompted public schools to trim programs and increase class sizes, making private school more appealing, has also left parents less able to come up with the $25,000 to $30,000 a year charged by many day schools. And for private schools, taking advantage of the perceived vulnerability of public schools is a chance to shore up their own battered finances.

Naturally, the advertising does not sit well with public schools' advocates, pulled between protesting the pain of lowered state aid to schools and defending the quality of those schools.

"I would view that to be very, very presumptuous in terms of characterizing educational excellence in the public schools," said Raymond R. Wiss, a board member of the Northern Valley School District, a few miles from Saddle River, who was recently elected president of the New Jersey School Boards Association.

"It's a challenging time for local board members and local school districts to deal with the fiscal aspects of public education," he said. "But I do not believe that there has been any significant curtailment at this juncture, not yet."

Private schools that belong to the New Jersey Association of Independent Schools have 2 to 3 percent lower enrollment than they did last year, said Linda Moore, executive director of the group. She said schools had to offer financial aid to more students, and bigger aid packages to keep the students they already had.

"There are parents who have lost jobs, especially in those areas where a lot of people work in finance," she said.

At Saddle River Day School, administrators say that about 20 percent of students get financial aid, up from 15 percent before the recession, and that enrollment has slid from about 330 to 300.

Elite private schools do little advertising, beyond notices of open houses and maybe an item in an education magazine or a newspaper's education supplement. In particular, this genteel set is not inclined to trumpet comparisons - however implied - with the competition.

"I haven't seen anything like that in this area," Thomas W. Nammack, headmaster of Montclair Kimberley Academy in Montclair, said of the Saddle River ads. "We haven't really taken out ads extolling the school in general."

But he found it understandable that a school would suddenly feel the need to drum up business, pointing to a sharp drop in the number of parents window-shopping at private schools. "People are either sure that they want to do this and make a commitment," Mr. Nammack said, "or they're not going to look."