The following article appeared in today’s Asbury Park Press. Below are excerpts of the article:

The Princeton Avenue School building costs the township’s district more than $500,000 each year in maintenance, while pupils at other schools must take classes in trailers, two reasons why the school district wants to sell the 97-year-old structure.

Tashbar elementary school, an Orthodox Jewish yeshiva, and the Lakewood Heritage Museum also use the building.

A flier written in Hebrew was circulated here in the days before the public school district accepted bids March 26 for the purchase of the building. The flier said it was on behalf of the religious school’s administration, parents and their pupils.

The flier said the sale of the school would displace Tashbar’s 230 pupils, and it asks people not to bid on the school and the 4-acre site.

The minimum bid for the school and the property, which takes up one block along Princeton Avenue and Sixth Street, was $6.5 million. The Board of Education based its asking price on an appraisal completed July 13, 2007.

The district received one bid, the minimum, from Beth Medrash Govoha. The yeshiva hand-delivered a check for $650,000, or 10 percent of the bid, as a deposit. It offered to pay the district in cash and land, with the land valued at $2.5 million.

District officials are still considering the offer.

Beth Medrash subleases space it leased from the district to the Tashbar school.

Somerset Development, Lakewood, expressed its displeasure with the narrow scope of the bidding and said the time constraints were too restrictive to put together a bid. The sale was advertised March 13 with the bids due two weeks later.

(Complete article on APP website – click HERE to be redirected)