EDITORIAL

District voters should back school budget.

   The South Brunswick school board is making the best of a bad situation.
   Faced with continued enrollment growth, rising personnel costs and an array of bad decisions by the state, the board has managed to keep its budget under control.
   That’s not to say that it has kept the tax rate flat. On the contrary, the proposed $126.1 million budget — which is 6.1 percent larger than the current-year budget — calls for a 12.5-cent increase in the tax rate.
   No one should be happy about this, but it would be wrong of voters to take out their frustration at a badly designed tax system on local students.
   School officials have done their best to keep taxes in check while also enhancing educational opportunities for local students and accounting for anticipated 3 percent enrollment growth (to more than 9,000 students in the district’s 10 schools) and fast-rising utility costs.
   The budget, if approved, would maintain average class sizes at 23 students in grades kindergarten through five and 25 in grades six through 12, continue providing full-day kindergarten and full art, music, physical education and other programs.
   It also includes revisions to the district’s math and world language curricula. The math improvements include new textbooks and a new online component that will allow parents to brush up on their own skills so that they can work more closely with their children, while the district will be offering Spanish to students in grades kindergarten through three for the first time.
   In addition, the budget accounts for the outfitting of new classrooms, libraries and gymnasiums in several schools.
   To pay for all of this, the board is asking voters to approve a 5.4 percent tax increase — or $250 for the owner of a house assessed at the township average of $200,000. That’s not a lot of money, especially when you consider that the board also will be paying for bad decisions made by the state over the last decade.
   The board has to make up for a shrinking surplus created by new state rules that went into effect last year. Under the rules, the district was forced to use most of its surplus account as revenue in its budget in 2005-2006 — about $4.4 million. That left a smaller amount available as revenue this year, about $540,000 less, which has to be made up somewhere else.
   In addition, the district has to pay an additional $400,000 into the state’s pension plan for non-teaching employees because of a series of pension revaluations and loans made against the system that have left it short of cash. South Brunswick — and every other district in the state — is facing the same problem.
   Voters need to understand these extenuating circumstances before walking into the voting booth and remember that voting "no" will not prevent taxes from going up. If the budget is defeated, it will go the Township Council. Last year, the council pared just $400,000 from the budget and a half cent from the proposed tax rate — just to send a message to a bunch of folks in Trenton who aren’t listening anyway.
   Voters who are angry over their property tax bills need to take their complaints to Trenton and demand real tax reform, which must include a change in the way in which we pay for public education.
   In the meantime, the township’s school budget deserves our support.