Phillipsburg School Board to examine feasibility of implementing a residency preference in hiring future employees

PHILLIPSBURG | Phillipsburg-area residents could get a leg up on the competition for Phillipsburg School District jobs.

That's if the school board moves ahead with member Tom McGuire's suggestion to implement a residency preference clause in the district hiring policy.

McGuire brought up the possibility of residency preference briefly during Monday's board meeting.

He said Friday the discussion had been going on for months behind closed doors, but never officially in public.

"In this case I wanted to memorialize it and make sure people are aware of it," McGuire said of the discussion.

If a number of candidates meet the terms of qualifications for a post, residency would be used as a tie-breaker under McGuire's suggestion.

"If you live here, you should get a preference for being hired in our district," he said.

The school board member even suggested a tiered approach to the residency preference, giving Phillipsburg and sending district residents a leg up over other New Jerseyans.

"I think it would be fair since a local person is paying the taxes in the town and in the county and that's what our employees are being paid from," McGuire said. "It would benefit our local residents to get a preference -- all things being equal."

School Board President Kevin DeGerolamo said Monday he'd support the idea if it passed muster with district legal counsel.

"In principle and theory, I like the idea," DeGerolamo told McGuire. "I agree with you 100 percent on that."

Residency a hot topic

Mike Yapel, spokesman for the New Jersey School Boards Association, said no data exists for how prevalent residency preferences are in school districts. Hiring policies aren't watched that closely, he said, but the practice is quite common when it comes to other public sectors.

"We've definitely seen it at the municipal and county levels, but we're not sure how often schools have residency preferences for hiring," Yapel said.

Doing so appears to be legal. Yapel pointed out a 1978 New Jersey statute allowing for local governing bodies to require workers to live within the boundaries.

"The idea being that if you want taxes to go up, you'll be affected, too," he said.

Residency laws have come into and gone out of vogue over a number of years, Yapel said, but rarely do strict requirements get much headway -- especially when bordering states get anxious.

Such a battle over bills started earlier this year when the New Jersey Senate approved a bill requiring public sector workers to reside in the Garden State. That bill has stalled in committee in the state Assembly.

In June, Pennsylvania Sen. Lisa Boscola, D-Lehigh/Monroe/Northampton, introduced a similar measure in an attempt to demonstrate to New Jersey lawmakers what they might lose. So far, there's been no vote on that legislation.

"Usually cooler heads prevail," Yapel said of the saber rattling.

Not discriminatory

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is a federal agency that protects workers against discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, age, disability or genetics.

Spokesman James Ryan said a person's residency would most certainly not fall into what is considered discriminatory.

"Not in the laws we deal in," he said. "The only way this would come into play somehow would be if people were treated different because of one of" the other categories of discrimination.

Phillipsburg Education Association President Debra Smith said the union has no official stance on the residency discussions.

But if McGuire's proposal is truly used only as preference in hiring as opposed to a hard and fast requirement, Smith said she sees nothing damaging with the suggestion.

"If the (candidates for a job) are equally qualified, I don't see a problem with it," Smith said.