EAST BRUNSWICK — Township residents will see a reduced school tax hike this year .
The Board of Educationwill reduce its tax levy for the coming school year by $652,600, amovemade possible by the recent arrival of $1.3 million in additional state aid.
Gov. Chris Christie announced earlier this month that it would distribute $75 million in new state aid to school districts in Middlesex County. The additional aid means that East Brunswick Public Schools will receive about $16.5million in state aid this year, after seeing just $13.8 million in aid for the 2010-11 school year.
The Board of Education voted July 18 to use the extra money in a variety of ways.
The $652,600 going to tax relief amounts to 3.321 cents on the tax rate. The owner of property with a home assessed at $100,000 would have seen a school tax increase of $99 this year based on the 2011-12 budget that voters approved in April. That homeowner will instead see a $66 increase.
The board will use $658,998 of the additional state aid for capital and technology improvements, and $16,683 to pay for a mandatory increase in its charter school payment.
“The board is very grateful to the community for approving the 2011-12 budget,” Board of Education President Todd Simmens said. “The board therefore wanted to balance its significant facilities and capital projects needs with the needs of our taxpaying community.”
He said the board agreed to return about 50 percent of the new state aid to the taxpayers, and use the other half for priority projects that have been deferred year after year due to financial constraints.
One of the priorities will be to improve the schools’science laboratory classrooms, bringing some of them into compliance with standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Also, computers that are in need of updating will be replaced, Simmens said.
Though the improvements will be helpful, they will barely put a dent in the needs of the school buildings that are about a half-century old, he said.
The entirety of the additional funds could have been used for improvements, but Simmens said the board members felt it was important to give some of the money back to they community.
“The board felt that it was important also to pass along a tax decrease to the community, especially now,” he said.
The funds going to the Hatikvah International Academy Charter School are in addition to the $1.5 million that the board budgeted for the school for the 2011-12 school year. The state required the district to increase its payment, Simmens said. This will be the charter school’s second year of operation.