Central Office

For 12,000 to 15,000 public school musicians, regional music festivals are a chance to showcase their talents. But some students may not have an opportunity to perform this year - it's uncertain whether the popular music festivals will go on. That's because the School District has shifted responsibility for the events to the six region offices, which have the option of hosting the concerts - or not. There is no one in the central office...

Think back a week. Think of how comfortable it would have been to go to work and yet not leave the house. No need to dig out the driveway or wait an hour for the bus. No need for coats and boots (no boots!), nor to arrange last-minute day care for suddenly homebound children. Just make a cup of coffee, pop a video in for the kids and wander into the home office wearing fuzzy slippers rather than high heels. (Of course, the quiet and concentration will be broken when the kids start fighting, the dirty dishes beckon, your mother calls and the only productive thing to do is bake cookies.

Can a school do without a principal? Yes, says the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. In the intensifying battle over how to chop $60 million from the school district budget, the union says that the system is crawling with unnecessary administrators and can easily save $40 million by eliminating 80 of its 278 principals and all 190 assistant principals, as well as 180 supervisors in the central and regional offices. If these cuts were made, according to the union, the district could spare its interscholastic athletics and other extracurricular programs - the very areas that high school principals this week recommended be dropped.

More than seven months after their contract expired, secretaries and classroom aides in the Methacton School District finally have a new three-year agreement. The Educational Services Personnel Association and the Methacton Board of School Directors ratified the tentative agreement Feb. 11. The board gave final approval Tuesday. The contract, which affects about 71 district employees, calls for 4.5 percent increases in each of the three years. Union members now will pick up 10 percent of the cost for full health benefits.

On any given school day, more than 600 of Chester High School's 1,700 students are absent. Two hundred more students are probably in the school building, but not in class. Those staggering statistics do not even include the estimated 500 students who have dropped out of the high school since the start of this school year, according to Janice Hoffman-Willis of the Chester Upland School District. "The absentee problem is a sore that has been allowed to fester for years, and we have to act now to do something before we lose the hand," she said.

A new style of management is among the changes the Mount Laurel School District will implement this year as its five-year strategic plan to improve the district gets underway. "I'm completely convinced that we are headed in the right direction more than ever before," said superintendent James Anzide. "Our mission is to increase the level of achievement, and unless we begin to change the structure of the organization to get people involved, we can't proceed with the other changes we want to make.

Malik Muhammad remembers the day a gunman shot and killed a man on Lancaster Avenue near 42nd Street last month. And how that same night, the owner of a deli was shot in the chest in an exchange of gunfire during a $20 robbery. And a week before, the 1:30 a.m. police call to Muhammad's own house telling him that his civic association, in the same block, had been firebombed. Muhammad, the executive director of Showcase Community Services and the president of Lancaster Avenue Business Association, is thankful officers spotted the fire before it destroyed the office.

The city is planning to decentralize its fight against street-level drug dealers by assigning about 100 narcotics investigators to neighborhood duty in the Police Department's nine regional divisions. Currently, all anti-drug efforts are centrally administered through the Narcotics Unit, the Narcotics Strike Force and uniformed narcotics officers. This central force, with some 200 officers, will be maintained at present levels, said police spokesman Capt. Richard DeLise. It will continue to be responsible for citywide investigations aimed at major suppliers, he said.

In a concrete vault beneath North 17th Street in Center City, Bob Tollok was sitting on a low bench with maybe 30 pounds of an incomprehensible tangle of twisted, colored telephone lines at his feet. Into and out of this damp basement of a vault converge almost all the telephone lines in Center City. From the vault they snake up into Bell of Pennsylvania's central office at 1631 Arch St., where phone traffic that enters, travels through or leaves Center City is directed. Tollok, a line splicer for Bell of Pennsylvania, was splicing hundreds of these lines on Monday.

The New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) supports the state's responsibility to intervene in deficient school districts but opposes the so- called school-takeover legislation as it is currently proposed. More accurately, Assembly Bill 2927 establishes the governance of a school district after intervention. Some of the state's ideas about how districts should be operated create the problems. It should be stressed that NJEA believes the state has an obligation to do everything in its power to ensure the best quality education for all New Jersey students.