By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
A proposed $84.24 million school budget, balanced “tightly” to compensate for increases in utilities and health benefits, would raise taxes by a little less than $149 on average in Princeton, the district said this week.
The Board of Education adopted the tentative budget on Tuesday, as the spending plan next goes to the Mercer County Superintendent of Schools for approval.
”Just seeing health benefits and utility costs increase far beyond 2 percent enables everyone to understand how that budget pressure squeezes everything else,” said Superintendent of Schools Judith A. Wilson on Wednesday. Overall spending is proposed to increase by a little more than 2 percent compared to the current school budget.
In this first year of consolidation, the town has a school tax rate that no longer applies differently for the borough and the township. In past years, there would be times when the school tax increase would go up more in one town than in the other. The amount to be raised through taxation to support the fiscal 2014 budget is $64.7 million. At the average assessed home of $799,600, the increase comes out to $148.59.
The spending plan calls for no job or program cuts, said board member Dan Haughton, chairman of the board’s finance committee, at Tuesday’s board meeting. He also noted the district is due to lose some of its federal money due to the sequestration, although he pointed out the district does not depend that much on federal aid.
”The potential loss from sequestration will be $87,000,” Ms. Wilson said. She said the funds, representing a portion of the overall federal aid the district gets, go toward summer programs, supplemental learning for at-risk students and special education programs.
She said that although the district gets little in the way of federal dollars, “in this very tight budget, $87,000 is significant.”
The district has scheduled a March 21 public hearing on the budget at the John Witherspoon Middle School cafeteria. Voters will not decide the budget this year as they have in the past. When the Board of Education decided to move school board elections from April to November, the decision also meant the budget did not have to go on the ballotso long as it stayed within the 2-percent-tax cap.
That was part of what the state called an incentive to induce school districts to move elections from the spring to the fall.

