Magazine

As the 2009 school year was about to begin, Irene Sterling worried about the 27,000 schoolchildren in Paterson, her home city, the third largest in New Jersey. A parent of a former Paterson student and now head of the Paterson Education Fund, Sterling watched budgets flat-line. This year there were no increases to keep up with the standard 3 to 4 percent annual uptick in budgets, filled mainly with teacher salaries and run-of-the-mill line items, like energy costs. She wondered where, with so many English-as-a-second-language learners and kids living at the poverty line, fat could possibly be trimmed.