The school board has sent residents a notice that it will hold a special meeting Nov. 23 to consider ending the expanded arrangement and having its kindergarten through sixth-grade students return to its lone school.

The board now says it entered into the agreement because it was being pressured by the state to consolidate with other districts and could take the pressure off by expanding its agreement with Winslow for three years.

It also expected that Winslow would be able to provide Chesilhurst students with programming it could not provide itself because of budget constraints, including Spanish, art, music and a gifted program. But, board President Derek Kennedy said in his notice to residents, "many of the benefits we expected to occur have not."

Kennedy wrote that board members expected Winslow to use Chesilhurst's school building to offset tuition costs with rental income, but that didn't happen. He also wrote that because Chesilhurst was lumped into state legislation declaring it a nonoperating school district in June, a de facto consolidation was created -- voiding the last two years of the three-year expanded agreement, eliminating the school board and possibly resulting in higher school taxes.

In October, the Chesilhurst board authorized researching the feasibility of reopening the district's school, which opened in 1975 as the Chesilhurst School and was later renamed for Foster, a former longtime administrator.

The Nov. 23 meeting is the latest in a series of steps that have confounded many of the primarily black borough's 1,900 residents.

Faced with a state mandate to come up by March 2010 with a consolidation plan to merge with one or more other districts, the school board voted last spring to expand its sending-receiving relationship with Winslow, which was already accepting Chesilhurst's middle and high school students.