Costs still too high

Larry Simms,
former Municipal
Workgroup member
Lambertville
    The elected municipal officials of Lambertville, Stockton, and West Amwell voted by resolution to cut the fourth defeated South Hunterdon Regional High School (SHRHS) budget by $117,190. Added to the previous cuts of the other three defeated budgets ($55,000, $301,000, and $228,000, respectively) the four year total is now $701,190.
   This total would appear to be cuts substantial enough over the four-year period to bring the SHRHS comparative cost per pupil close to the state average. However, it is not.
   The last four proposed and defeated operating budgets totaled $34,583,023, not including debt services. That means the total $701,190 four-year cut amounted to a 2.03 percent of those proposed budgets. A cut of that per cent makes little movement towards bringing the SHRHS costs close to state averages.
   This fact is substantiated by the recently released New Jersey Department of Education (DOE) data on Taxpayers’ Guide to Education Spending. In the released data for the current school year 2010-2011, the Budgeted Costs Amount Per Pupil for SHRHS continued for the ninth consecutive year to be the most expensive in its comparative group of 47 regional schools grades seven-12 and nine-12. With a Budgeted Cost Per Pupil of $20,583, SHRHS is $7,014 per pupil over the state average of $13,569. Stated another way, in Budgeted Costs Amount Per Pupil, SHRHS is 51.7 percent over the state average. And with the student enrollment of 350, that amounts to $2,454.900 in spending over the state average for just this one year.
   If one looks at the Total Spending Per Pupil at SHRHS for 2009-2010, the costs are even more distanced from state average. The Total Spending Per Pupil, which includes transportation and debt services, was $31,800 as compared to the state average of $18,525. Here SHRHS is $13,275 per pupil over the state average. Stated another way, in Total Cost Per Pupil, SHRHS is 71.7 percent over the state average. And with the student enrollment of 346 for 2009-2010, that amounts to $4,593,150 in spending over the state average for just this one year on SHRHS’s total budget of $10,992,177.
   Therefore, it seems reasonable for those residents who have voted “no” in the last four years on the SHRHS proposed operating budgets to expect better compromise than the average 2.03 percent cuts the elected municipal officials have negotiated with the SHRHS administration and board.
   After this fourth budget defeat, it also seems reasonable for the residents who voted “no” to expect the SHRHS administration and board to now re-examine their uncompromising position on educational structures at SHRHS that are attempting to replicate the educational structures of a school with a large student enrollment like Hunterdon Central rather than implementing educational structures appropriate for a small enrollment school.
   This would mean taking actions before presenting the 2012-13 budget and consolidating course offering, reducing extracurricular offerings, consolidating the top three administrative positions into two, reducing the eight secretarial positions, moving to on-line learning for advanced placement classes of fewer than ten students, and researching the cost savings of outsourcing transportation. These suggestions are not new; they have been presented at the Municipal Workgroup meetings over the last two years and mostly ignored.
   Certainly, these are just a few of the possible actions which could be implemented to bring the SHRHS operating budget close to per pupil costs of the other New Jersey public secondary schools. The current Administration and Board would have a better chance of passing future budgets if such cost savings measures were implemented.
   Just getting out the “yes” vote by the SHRHS administration and board through merely giving a positive spin to their costly operating budgets is no longer working.
   Instead, the SHRHS administration and board need to significantly bring down their operating costs and present flat and lowered tax levies over the next five years to regain the support for their budgets in the three historically pro-education districts of Lambertville, Stockton, and West Amwell.