Board must trim $400,000 to $500,000 to get below projected state cap.
By: Jeff Milgram
They’ve made some cuts and taken money from their surplus, but Princeton Regional School District officials still must trim between $400,000 and $500,000 from next year’s budget.
It is still too early to tell whether the budget will fall within the $52.9 million cap, Superintendent Claire Sheff Kohn said Wednesday. The state has not yet released aid figures that will allow a precise determination of the revenue side of the budget. The current budget is $51.4 million.
State aid figures will not be released until Feb. 26, two days after the board was originally scheduled to adopt its tentative budget, Dr. Kohn announced at the end of Wednesday night’s special board meeting.
The board is now scheduled to adopt the tentative budget at a special meeting at 6 p.m., March 9 at the John Witherspoon Middle School and reschedule its March 23 meeting to March 30 for the public hearing and adoption of the budget.
In the meantime, administrators and members of the board’s Finance Committee keep chipping away at the budget numbers.
"We did make some headway, but we’re not at the bottom line yet," Alan Hegedus, chairman of committee, said Wednesday.
The district initially was about $3 million over the estimated cap, but about $1.5 million in initial cuts were made, Dr. Kohn said. In a second round of cuts, Dr. Kohn recommended an additional $500,000 in cost savings, said Mr. Hegedus.
The district will not know exactly how many more dollars it will have to cut from the budget until it gets enrollment and aid figures from the state, Dr. Kohn said.
The state has frozen aid to school districts for the past two years.
Dr. Kohn has recommended the board use $600,000 from its surplus, which leaves between $400,000 and $500,000 to be cut to get the budget under the estimated cap, she said.
"Right now I have a sense of recommendations, but I do not have a consensus that they are the final cuts," Dr. Kohn said, adding that the district has some tough choices to make.
"We’re getting into a couple thousand dollars here, five to eight thousand dollars there," Mr. Hegedus said of the second round of budget cuts. "(Dr. Kohn) is proposing we stay lean and mean."
Mr. Hegedus said some positions may be eliminated, but he didn’t know how many or where the staff cuts would be made.
Dr. Kohn said the administration will try to renegotiate its contract with its health-care provider in hopes of reducing that expenditure.
If the board cannot bring the budget under the cap, one option is to ask voters to approve a second budget question during the school elections April 20.
Mr. Hegedus said the board would not pose a second question for an amount as small as $500,000, but might restore some of the cuts and file for a second question for a larger amount.
"It’s more a question of what we wanted to include," Mr. Hegedus said. "It (a second question) is highly probable. We know we’d like to resist. … In my personal opinion, it’s likely we’ll have one."
But Dr. Kohn doesn’t think so. "I’m certainly not recommending it," she said, "but that ultimately will be up to the board to decide."
Right now, the board is going to look for more cuts.
"It’s a tough struggle," Mr. Hegedus said.
In a related matter, the board approved $340,432 in change orders Wednesday night for the district’s $81.3 million school renovation and expansion project.