School budgets may be buried, not praised

PACKET EDITORIAL, Feb. 28

By: Packet Editorial
   If Julius Caesar had good reason to beware the Ides of March, the American taxpayer generally takes a similar view toward the Ides of April. There may be other auspicious dates we all remember — Dec. 7, 1941, Nov. 22, 1963, Sept. 11, 2001 — but only April 15 strikes at our hearts (and our wallets) every year.
   As painful as the thought of April 15 may be to many taxpayers, it could be doubly painful this year to folks who care about New Jersey’s public schools. Call it Caesar’s revenge. By the fate of the Julian calendar, April 15, 2003, happens to be the date of our annual school elections.
   For superintendents, board of education members, school administrators, teachers, involved parents and others who keep their fingers crossed every year that voters will approve the annual school budget, this may be the year to start looking for rabbit’s feet and four-leaf clovers. If ever a soothsayer were to see in the stars a conspiracy of forces aligned against passage of local school budgets, it is this April 15.
   Think about it. The economy has tanked. Unemployment is rising. A falling stock market is cracking people’s nest eggs. The price of heating oil and gasoline is going through the roof. As April 15 approaches, and taxpayers calculate the bottom line of their annual contribution to Uncle Sam, they aren’t likely to be in a forgiving — or giving — mood.
   Then, coincidentally, on the very same day these disgruntled taxpayers are trudging to the mailbox to send their income tax returns to the Internal Revenue Service, they can go straight from the post office to the ballot box and register their feelings about local property taxes. And because school elections are the only elections in New Jersey where voters get to cast ballots directly for or against a budget, the likelihood of a same-day backlash this year is considerable.
   We’ve never understood what motivated the framers of New Jersey’s Constitution to make school budgets — and only school budgets — subject to direct voter approval. Members of borough councils and township committees have the authority to strike municipal budgets. Freeholders craft the county budget. Legislators set the state budget. Congress approves the federal budget. None of these budgets needs to be submitted to voters.
   But for some reason, the fiscal responsibility delegated to every other arm of representative government is not extended to boards of education in New Jersey. Here, we permit our elected board members — who serve tirelessly and, for the most part, thanklessly — only to propose the annual school budget, not to adopt it. That privilege is reserved for the relative handful of citizens, usually somewhere between 8 and 12 percent of registered voters, who bother to show up at school elections.
   This number tends to swell, however, whenever the economy contracts, not because voters have developed a sudden interest in the local schools but because they want to seize the only opportunity they have to vent their frustration about taxes. Especially property taxes. Especially here in New Jersey, where property taxes are perpetually among the highest in the nation. When you consider that as much as 70 percent of a homeowner’s property tax bill goes to support the public schools, it’s amazing — indeed, it’s a tribute to the ability of boards of education and their supporters to mobilize their core constituency year after year — that any school budgets are ever approved in New Jersey.
   This year, all of our local school districts — Princeton, West Windsor-Plainsboro and Montgomery — are looking at substantial increases in their budgets, with corresponding hikes in their property-tax rates. Over the next six weeks, they have a huge selling job ahead of them. We suspect it will take all the skill they can muster for the voters to be kinder to the schools on this Ides of April than Brutus, Cassius and their dagger-wielding comrades were to Caesar on that fateful Ides of March.