Week in Review: Elderly Pedestrian Killed in Bus Crash, School Administrators Decline Pay Raises

An elderly Fort Lee woman was struck and killed by a bus Friday, walking not in front of, but alongside the bus on Main St. 91-year-old Soon Yae Kim of Fort Lee died Saturday from wounds sustained in the crash, officials said.

The Bergen County Prosecutor's office said the accident occurred at about 9 a.m. Friday in front of the senior building on Main St. near the intersection of Main and John streets.

Kim was transported to HUMC in critical condition with internal injuries and injuries to her back, face and left arm, according to the prosecutor's office.She died late that night.

According to the information Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich received late Friday night, Kim was walking alongside a double-decker Academy bus with no intention of boarding the bus, when it began pulling away.

"She apparently was either leaning on it or near it somewhat when it made a slight turn ... and it knocked her over," Sokolich said. "They're not sure if the bus ran her over. They don’t think so, but she was old. She fell, and that’s bad."

Authorities said the bus was on its way from Fort Lee to Bergen Community College and continued heading west on its usual route along Main Street after the incident.

An NJ Transit bus was driving behind that bus, saw the accident unfold and reported it to the police, who were able to track down the driver, who had left the scene with passengers aboard. Johnson told Fort Lee police he wasn’t aware the accident occurred.

The prosecutor's office said no charges have been filed and that it is not being classified as a criminal investigation, but rather an accident investigation.

"This is an ongoing police investigation, and I would rather not comment [specifically] on that,” Sokolich said. “But it doesn’t sound to be like it was an intentional hit and run.”

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Fort Lee’s Superintendent of Schools, along with other top administrators, will decline salary increases next year in order to ease some of the financial burden on the district brought.

"I am going to personally take a salary freeze next year and forgo the increase that was in my contract," Superintendent Raymond Bandlow said at the Board of Education meeting Monday. "This budget is going to be challenging. We are now looking at a very difficult year, because we are under a very restrictive cap, a 2 percent cap, which will also make it necessary to make some serious reductions."

Other administrators expected to decline a pay increase are assistant superintendent Steven Engravalle and business administrator Cheryl Balletto, neither one of whom are contractually guaranteed pay raises

The school board’s 2011-2012 budget year is the first to be prepared under a new state law limiting public school districts to a tax increase of 2 percent.

"We hope that we can do some things to make it not necessary for us to reduce the number of employees that we did last year," Bandlow said.

Bandlow was scheduled to receive a 4 percent increase on his is $210,940 under his current contract, which started in 2009. A merit-based increase would have brought the total raise to 6 percent, but he said he’s giving up both.

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Also in schools news, The Fort Lee Board of Education announced Monday it is adopting stronger measures to ensure that students who are not residents of the borough do not attend Fort Lee Schools.

At the recommendation of its new Ad Hoc Residency Committee, the board will expand investigations and more aggressively pursue back tuition from anyone who violates residency policies.

The BOE says it is putting parents and guardians on notice “that if they enroll a child who is not entitled by law to attend school in Fort Lee, or if they move away from town without transferring their child out, they will be subject to civil action to recoup tuition.”

According to the BOE, the cost of tuition can run more than $17,000 a year.

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The United Republican Club of Fort Lee says it will file an Open Public Records Act (OPRA) request to determine exactly how much Fort Lee Police Chief Thomas Ripoli was paid in 2009 and 2010.

The Fort Lee Mayor and Council approved the pay increase at its Jan. 20 meeting,  but a second "yes" vote is still required to finalize the chief’s raise.

If the measure is approved, the nearly 40-year veteran of law enforcement and Fort Lee Police Chief since 2004 will receive $202,266 in 2011 and $206,311 in 2012 - up from $162,826 for 2006 through 2009, according to the article.

The Asbury Park Press website reports Ripoli’s salary for 2009, the last year for which data was available, at $162,826, backing up the Suburbanite’s contention.

That’s a 25 percent increase, argues the local Republican group, and an “unacceptable” one at that, in a letter they intended to have read into the record at Thursday’s mayor and council meeting.

However, says Fort Lee Republican Club president David Cohen, the group’s representative at the meeting was told that Ripoli’s current salary is more like $198,000, which would represent a more reasonable raise to $202,000 if it were accurate.

“We don’t want to go accusing people of things that they’re really not doing,” Cohen said. “That’s not fair. In fairness, what we’re going to go is request an OPRA on the chief’s salary for 2010 and [to validate the number for 2009]. If we’re barking up the wrong tree, so be it."

Judith Fisher, municipal committee chairwoman, is going to execute the OPRA, because, Cohen says, “we want to see it in black and white.”

“There’s a piece of the puzzle that’s missing here,” Cohen said. “The OPRA doesn’t lie. It seems as though people are talking out of both sides of their mouth. And let’s just find out where it really is.”

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The Fort Lee Board of Education plans to more vigorously enforce residency requirements after accepting its new ad hoc residency committee's recommendations Monday. Among those recommendations are monthly reports, re-defining the scope of investigators' jobs, employing an additional investigator on a part-time basis, making attempts to recover costs from residency policy violators, providing amnesty for those who withdraw students in violation of policy from Fort Lee schools and seeking the Fort Lee Mayor and Council's assistance in defining punitive measures in the future.

In an interview with Patch, Fort Lee Superintendent of Schools Raymond Bandlow said the district knows “that from time to time we have students who may seek to enroll, who are not residents of Fort Lee.”

“More often, where there may be a problem, is that someone is a resident of Fort Lee but moves away without telling us and leaves their student enrolled,” Bandlow said. “In either case, we do substantial investigations, and we’ve been investigating for some time, and we find a few every year. It’s an appropriate step to take, because it is a matter that there is a cost in educating students. We should only be educating students who are legal residents, who are entitled.”

The week in review appears every Sunday on Fort Lee Patch.