By Katie Wagner, Staff Writer
MONTGOMERY — The Montgomery Township Board of Education was expected to unveil the first draft of the next school year’s proposed $76,103,696 budget to the public as The Packet went to press Thursday night.
The 2008-2009 budget calls for a 3.95-percent increase in spending from the 2007-08 school budget.
According to Montgomery Superintendent Sam Stewart, who has at least 30 years of experience working on school budgets in New Jersey, Montgomery’s 2008-2009 budget is the tightest one he’s ever seen put together.
”It’s extremely tight and I think it’s going to be a sign of the times,” Mr. Stewart said. “Increased costs of state-mandated programs that were already very expensive like special education, especially for sending students to programs outside of the district, have put a lot of pressure on the regular budget, because there’s only so much in the pie, he said.”
Montgomery taxpayers will be expected to contribute a total of $65,286,662 to the total budget, bringing the school-tax rate to $1.735 per $100 of assessed valuation, a 2.3-percent increase from last year’s school-tax rate.
This means owners of a home assessed at $510,109, the average value of a house in Montgomery, would pay $8,852 to the school district, versus $8,653 for a home of the same value last year.
Although residents are being asked to contribute $65,286,662 to the budget, they will only vote on $58,972,133, since the additional $6,314,529 falls under the school board’s debt service fund. According to School Business Administrator Tom Venanzi, residents will not be voting on the $6,314,529 in this year’s school board elections because voters previously approved paying this amount in a referendum that sought authorization from the public to borrow money for various projects.
The $58,972,133 falls under the budget category of money generated by the general tax levy. While state law allows the district to increase the general tax levy by 4 percent, the budget under review increases it by 3.36 percent or $1,917,754, instead of the permitted $2,282,175.
The school district decided to limit the amount it is increasing the local tax levy because of the increase in state aid the state’s new school funding formula assigns to Montgomery, according to Mr. Venanzi. Under the recently passed formula, called the School Funding Reform Act of 2008, the school district would receive an approximately 20 percent increase in state aid.
The bulk of the budget, however, will still be funded by local taxes, with 85.79 percent of the budget placed on the taxpayers. State aid will fund 7.43 percent of the budget and state grants, federal aid, surplus funds and a variety of miscellaneous sources will each fund 3 percent or less of the budget.
”Miscellaneous” sources of revenue, which include tuition and transportation fees for Rocky Hill students, activity fees from the district’s students in the seventh through 12th grades and athletic event ticket sales, will cover approximately 1 percent of the budget. The total value of the anticipated miscellaneous revenue is $782,000 versus the $631,000 in miscellaneous revenue included in the 2007-2008 school budget.
Part of this increase in the amount of miscellaneous sources of revenue the school district is anticipating is based on its expectation that Front Row Marketing Services, a consulting firm hired by the school district in September to help it sell naming rights to some of its athletic and other facilities, will generate revenue for the 2008-2009 budget. According to Mr. Venanzi, the school district is expecting to generate $75,000 from naming rights sales for next school year.
Another more conservative assumption the school district is making is that it will only receive enough state grant money to fund .12-percent of the budget. While it is too early to know exactly how much grant money the school district will receive, Montgomery tends to receive about the same amount of money in state, federal and local grants each school year, Mr. Venanzi said. He added that the school district has created a budget based on the assumption that it will receive a total of $1,191,641 in grant money, down $234,678 from the amount it received last year.
Copies of a 46-page brochure on the 2008-2009 budget were expected to be released to the public during Thursday’s presentation.
The board has scheduled several more public meetings on the budget for February and March. The next meeting, which will be held at 7 p.m. Monday in the Montgomery Middle School’s upper campus media center, will provide an explanation on how changes to the school district’s transportation schedule next school year will impact the budget.
