When students next fall return to a Ridge High School where one instructional period will be cut to save money in a tight school budget, they will have the option of earning class credits in other ways, including online courses. Sean Siet, director of the school's curriculum, said he expects only a limited number of students — at the very most, 10 percent of the school's population of 1,700 — will sign up for online classes. Even so, Siet said students will have access to about 3,000 online courses, which they may chose to take after receiving permission from the high school administration.…

A couple of years ago, school officials were complaining that state aid was stuck at a flat $3.3 million or so, and that absorbing skyrocketing costs in areas like health and pension costs made it difficult to stay under the state's 4-percent cap on annual spending increases. But from this year's vantage point, that era looks like the good old days, Board of Education members observed ruefully at last week's board meeting. With this year's state aid a scant 15 percent of what the Bernards Township school system had received the year before, combined with other losses in aid and tax revenues, …

On Monday night, the Board of Education may consider whether to allow some of its Parent-Teacher Organizations to move ahead with projects far beyond the scope of the type of activities and "extras" that PTOs funded in years past. Knowing that school funding is very unlikely to be available for such a project in forseeable future, the PTO at the Cedar Hill School already has raised a good part of an estimated $100,000 needed to renovate and brighten a school library that largely dates back to the 1950s, said Christina Ehret, co-president of that elementary school's PTO. The ambitious project…

Ginger Pedecine's youngest child left the Liberty Corner Elementary School a little more than three years ago, but if all goes as expected, she'll soon be back at the school on a weekly basis. It isn't that Pedecine has obtained a paying job at the school where she said she admires the staff and loves the students. Instead, she is one of about a half-dozen parents being groomed as volunteers to reinforce language arts and mathematics skills for some of the school's first-graders. That was a role previously filled by school aides whose jobs were cut from this year's school budget. School aides…