The past month has seen a very active discussion by fed-up Jackson taxpayers of the desirability of getting the Jackson School District Board of Education to cooperate in keeping the 2012-13 budget at this year’s level .
While I am in total agreement with that objective, I must caution that this board, no less than any of its precursors of the last six years, is totally tone deaf to any suggestion to voluntarily forgo inflating the operating (GF) budget to the maximum permissible amount, including any and all waivers they can talk the county superintendent into approving.
To them, those are “the children’s dollars,” even though in their more lucid moments they readily admit that fully 70-plus percent of the budget goes to pay New Jersey EducationAssociation and administrators’ steadily inflating salaries and benefits, all the kvetching about cuts and (advertised, but never seen) freezes notwithstanding. You may as well try to get the devil to dip his finger in holy water.
The board is notorious for its steadfast refusal to come down to earth and face the fiscal reality of a town rapidly verging on bankruptcy due to more than a decade of determined, harebrained and persistent overspending and overpromising by our spineless fiscally incontinent elected school and municipal officials.
It is a steady recurrent refrain of the board’s inability/refusal to give the taxpayers a clean budget proposal clearly separating the state-mandated Adequacy Budget (AB), which we have to fund, from their ever-growing wish list of programs to build their collective résumé and which the state will not fund, and neither should we, the taxpayers.
If the board geniuses want to promote home-baked improvements on the core curriculum designed by a commission of state and general experts, they must submit a detailed cost/benefit proposal that we can vote on aside from the fully staffed and loaded AB as a second question on the budget. If the voters approve the boondoggle, so be it (they most likely will not).
Whining that “it (whatever boondoggle they are trying to peddle) is for the children” is wearing very thin and is nothing more than a smokescreen for a game of reverse generational theft the board plays on the paying suckers, i.e., the taxpayer parents and grandparents of the students.
The board’s fiscal incontinence and obstructionism are institutionalized. The only way we can change that mindset is to change the composition of the board and then fire the lackluster administrator (i.e., put him on notice by June 30, 2012, that his overstuffed contract expiring June 30, 2013, will not be renewed).
In the meantime we have to keep voting down their bloated budgets and then hold the feet of the Township Council members to the fire to make sure they cut the GF tax levy at least to the previous year’s value, which will ensure no increase in the tax rate, or maybe a reduction if the tax base (ratables) increases, which has not happened since revaluation in 2009.
It is therefore essential that we hold the line at the current value of the GF tax levy, $70.642 million, in next year’s school budget.
The time has come for as many interested/informed attendees as possible to show up at upcoming board budget workshop meetings to provide adult fiscal guidance (discipline) to our fiscally incontinent dysfunctional board.
An informed, alert voting public is our best defense against the board’s overreach and shell games. All labor contracts must be cut back to sustainable levels in line with the looming town bankruptcy. It is time for a cold-turkey cure.
Nicolas Antonoff Jackson