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A businessman with a track record of aiding Catholic schools is launching a nonprofit aimed at raising at least $100 million in private funds to support all quality schools in Philadelphia, whether public, charter, Catholic, or private. Michael O'Neill, who has also helped charters, said his newest project would support success. "My goal is better education for kids," he said. "A seat that's producing a graduate is a successful seat," O'Neill said. "One which is not producing a graduate is not. " The initiative, the Philadelphia Schools Project, and its broad outlines were introduced to educators and philanthropists in June.

The township's bid to pull out of the Lower Camden County Regional High School District will live or die at the polls. The petition to secede was approved by state officials, including Commissioner of Education Mary Lee Fitzgerald, late Wednesday and was announced to township and regional school officials by Camden County School Superintendent John M. Sherry. The pullout still must be approved, by referendum, by a majority of the voters in both Winslow Township and the district taken as a whole.

Nobel Learning Communities Inc. has signed a strategic partnership agreement with the largest operator of private schools in China, the company said yesterday. "This is the first step toward Nobel's establishment of an international network of private schools," said A.J. "Jack" Clegg, chairman and CEO of the Media-based education company. Nobel signed the papers outlining the partnership with South Ocean Development Corp. in Beijing last week. Nobel operates 162 schools in 16 states with a total enrollment of more than 26,000 students.

Students and parents in the Tredyffrin/Easttown School District will find numerous changes in the district next year. Renovations and additions to the district's five elementary buildings are scheduled to begin in June, the fifth grade is moving to the middle school in September, and there will be administrative changes at the elementary, middle and high schools in January. Dan Waters, who has been principal at Conestoga High School since July 1988, will become the director of educational programs in July 1995, a redefined position currently held by Barry Yocom, the director of curriculum and instruction.

For months, residents have been awaiting word on whether Winslow Township will be able to establish its own K-12 school district. Now they will also have to wait to find out who will be leading their elementary schools. Barry Galasso, the district's school superintendent, has accepted a post as superintendent of the Eastern Camden County Regional School District. Galasso said yesterday that he would begin his new job Oct. 1. "This presents another challenge in my career," he said.

When seven towns in southern Camden County formed a regional school district in 1939, their union made sense both educationally and financially. There was no way the small, rural communities could support their own football teams and high school cafeterias. But times have changed. As the farmlands and cranberry bogs of Waterford and Winslow have given way to cul-de-sacs and two-car garages, the populations of those townships have tripled and then tripled again. Now, the Lower Camden County Regional School District is packed to the gills, with 1,000 more students than its four schools should hold.

CONGRATULATIONS on your editorial welcoming Paul Vallas as superintendent of schools (July 11). I know Mr. Vallas from when he was chief executive for the Chicago public schools, and I played a similar role in Detroit. Mr. Vallas is plainly the most effective and successful big city public school leader in America,and we are fortunate that he is coming here. I hope, however, that Mr. Vallas won't follow your advice to ignore Mayor Street. No big-city school chief can succeed without the support of the mayor.

Each Sunday from now until the Republican National Convention, the Commentary Page will run the responses of Republicans to the following question: Name one challenge or issue facing the nation that is especially important to you, and talk about what the Republican Party should do to address it. U.S. REP. MIKE CASTLE DELAWARE Providing a high-quality education for our young people is the number one priority for most Americans. It is vitally important to prepare our children for the challenges of the 21st century.

Nobel Learning Communities Inc., the Media-based school operator, said yesterday that acquisitions and increased enrollment helped it produce record annual revenues and a 56 percent increase in net earnings. Revenues for the fiscal year ended June 30 rose to $127.4 million, up from $109.76 million a year earlier. In a conference call with analysts, A.J. "Jack" Clegg, chairman and chief executive officer of the for-profit education company, pointed out that net earnings increased by more than 50 percent each year for the last two years.

Ben Franklin would be smiling. His university in his adopted hometown is embarking on some practical good deeds in support of education. The University of Pennsylvania will work with the city school district to develop one elementary school and to replant a magnet high school in West Philadelphia. This is notable because most elite universities' participation in K-12 education involves running private academies, not bolstering public schools. Under an agreement announced Thursday, Penn would sell two parcels of land to the school district at nominal cost.

A businessman with a track record of aiding Catholic schools is launching a nonprofit aimed at raising at least $100 million in private funds to support all quality schools in Philadelphia, whether public, charter, Catholic, or private. Michael O'Neill, who has also helped charters, said his newest project would support success. "My goal is better education for kids," he said. "A seat that's producing a graduate is a successful seat," O'Neill said. "One which is not producing a graduate is not. " The initiative, the Philadelphia Schools Project, and its broad outlines were introduced to educators and philanthropists in June.

The families of the 70 preschool and elementary students at Oak Lane Day School in Blue Bell got the bad news in an e-mail. Despite selling the school's bucolic, 30-acre campus last month to try to stay afloat, the financial challenges of finding a new home and operating a tiny school in an increasingly competitive private school market were just too great. After 93 years of offering progressive education, Oak Lane will close in June. No matter what the school's board tried, it could not make the numbers work.

A New Jersey commission that wants tiny towns to merge yesterday got tips from the state Department of Education, which this month began folding small school districts into larger ones nearby. Gov. Corzine last year began to push mergers and shared services between public entities as a way to eliminate duplication and reduce taxes. The state has 566 municipalities, the most per square mile in the country, and 616 school districts. State Education Commissioner Lucille Davy appeared before the Local Unit Alignment Reorganization and Consolidation Commission (LUARC)

As chief executive officer of Philadelphia Academy Charter School, Brien N. Gardiner took home a $164,500 salary in 2005-06 - more than most superintendents in the region made. That same year, Gardiner collected an additional $60,000 as CEO of Northwood Academy, a second charter school, giving him a total salary of $224,500. The Philadelphia School District gave the schools a combined $14.6 million in taxpayer dollars to educate 1,700 students in kindergarten to 12th grade. This fall, as Gardiner's educational empire in the Northeast grew, a small group of parents and district officials became concerned about the way Philadelphia Academy was being managed, including the hiring of administrators' family members.

Lynda Hitchman was teaching math to an eighth-grade class at Logan Elementary School, placing examples on an overhead projector so her students could see the points she was trying to illustrate. Perfectly normal. Except that Hitchman was about 25 miles away from her Gloucester County students, standing in a tiny room at the Rutgers Center for the Arts, just off Third Street in Camden. Hitchman is in charge of D'Arts, a distance-learning program that the center offers to students in kindergarten through 12th grade.

Closing of school affects all children Re: The proposed closing of the K-5 Walnut Street School in North Woodbury. Having heard 30 residents - all upset about the plan - speak last week at a board hearing held at the school, I must let parents of children who attend the other two elementary schools in town, Evergreen Avenue and West End, know this will affect them, too. This reconfiguration, as the school board calls it, intended to...

Gov. Corzine can't be expected to wolf down everything put on his plate. But he should try to work up a bigger appetite for a proposal to merge Rutgers University and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. Corzine says he's "agnostic" about the idea. Two new studies under way should make him a believer. The merger needs to happen, but won't unless the governor pushes for it. Scandal-ridden UMDNJ needs to be euthanized. The time is ripe to reconfigure the two medical schools within UMDNJ as part of a state university system.

Just because two Philadelphia prep schools deemed academically unworthy by the NCAA once employed Lutheran Christian Academy's Darryl Schofield as a basketball coach, he doesn't see it as anything to get fired up about. "It's just the preliminary list, that's all it is," Schofield said yesterday, after the release of a list citing 15 prep schools whose accreditations had been nullified by the NCAA. Students from those schools seeking college admission could find their credits from this school year invalidated.

Announcing a new kind of partnership, the Philadelphia School District has hired six universities, a private company, and the Franklin Institute to improve 16 of its 260-plus schools. Though universities and businesses for years have helped local schools in a variety of partnerships, the new effort represents the most extensive and formal arrangement of this type, district officials said. "It's no longer the little program here and the little program there and the handshake here and the handshake there," said Sheila Royal-Moses, the district's newly hired director of university partnerships.

CONGRATULATIONS on your editorial welcoming Paul Vallas as superintendent of schools (July 11). I know Mr. Vallas from when he was chief executive for the Chicago public schools, and I played a similar role in Detroit. Mr. Vallas is plainly the most effective and successful big city public school leader in America,and we are fortunate that he is coming here. I hope, however, that Mr. Vallas won't follow your advice to ignore Mayor Street. No big-city school chief can succeed without the support of the mayor.