In an ongoing effort to change the Shore Regional High School (SRHS) funding formula, Sea Bright officials are petitioning the SRHS Board of Education (BOE) to add a nonbinding referendum question to the April ballot.
Councilwoman Dina Long, who chairs the council’s School Formula Advisory Committee, said the borough sent a letter to the SRHS BOE, which must approve the request to place the question on the ballot, but the borough has not yet had a response.
The Shore Regional BOE consists of nine members from the sending towns: one each from Sea Bright and Monmouth Beach, three from Oceanport and four from West Long Branch.
Long said she plans to attend the next BOE meeting, possibly along with the mayor, members of the committee and as many members of council as possible, to speak during the public portion of the meeting.
“We hope they’ll be discussing it as part of the agenda. At the very least we’ll be trying to speak in favor of [adding the question to the ballot] and [convince them] they should at least consider it,” she said.
Sea Bright has been advocating for a change in the formula so that it would be based on the number of students sent to SHRS.
SHRS sending communities include the boroughs of Oceanport, Monmouth Beach and West Long Branch in addition to Sea Bright. The disparity between the per-student cost among the sending towns has been an issue for years.
Under the current funding formula, the borough is paying about $80,000 a year per student for each of the 27 borough students who attend Shore Regional.
Oceanport pays about $12,990 per student to educate about 242 students at the high school, and West Long Branch ends up paying $12,969 to educate some 359 students.
The per-pupil cost equates to about 41.7 cents per $100 of assessed value for Sea Bright taxpayers.
The borough sought approval to add a question on the school funding formula to the November general election ballot, but the Monmouth County Clerk denied the request and an appeal of that decision was also denied.
In a letter to the borough, County Clerk Claire French said, “It is my opinion that you should not place the requested question on the ballot for the 2008 general election. Public questions are not permitted if they constitute a ‘prohibited intrusion’ into the affairs of a school district.”
The question the borough wanted to add to the general election ballot read, “Should the funding calculation for the Shore Regional High School budget be revised from its current method, which bases each municipality’s share on equalized property value, to a method in which each municipality pays a set fee for each of the pupils enrolled in the Shore Regional High School system from each municipality?”
Long said the letter recently sent to the high school “acknowledges the substantial achievements of Shore Regional, the school.”
“We talk about how Sea Bright voters coincidentally reject the school budget every April, but that is not because we don’t like the school, it’s because it’s the only way for Sea Bright voters to express their frustration for what we believe is a very inequitable school funding formula,” Long said.
She said the letter also points out language within the school funding formula law that talks about how a school may change the funding formula if it passes referendum.
“We talk about how we believe changing the formula to a combination of land value and per-pupil cost would make it more equitable for both Sea Bright and Monmouth Beach,” Long said. “We ask them to consider a joint formulated question with their input and our input and other towns’ input, for the April school ballot.”
She said the letter closes by imploring the BOE to make school taxes more equitable.
“I am optimistic that the school board will give this issue a fair hearing and serious consideration,” Long said.
If the BOE rejects Sea Bright’s request, the borough will continue to pursue a statewide change with legislators in Trenton and will keep working with the executive county superintendent of schools, Long said.
The next Shore Regional Board of Education meeting will take place Feb. 26 at 7 p.m. at the high school, located at 132 Route 36 in West Long Branch.