By Amy Batista, Special Writer
EAST WINDSOR – The East Windsor Regional School District Board of Education discussed its tentative budget during its meeting on March 7.
“What we have identified as our priorities have been guided by meetings with all of our stakeholders; analysis of our school level and district level data; input from all of our leadership team leaders; and looking at past budget practices and past budget processes,” said Superintendent of Schools Dr. Richard Katz.
Dr. Katz said at the board’s next meeting on March 21, there will be a much more extensive presentation with more details.
“We will have our tentative adoption that night as well,” he said, adding that the preliminary budget is due to the county the following day.
Dr. Katz went through the major aspects of the budget for the board and public.
“In order to put full-day kindergarten together we are looking at cost of approximately $1 million,” he said.
He said that the district would add 4.5 general education classroom teaching positions, two bilingual teachers to support the bilingual program and one special education teacher.
“So the total of (additional) teachers is seven and half,” he said.
Dr. Katz said costs of the materials its about $100,000 for the four core areas and all the supplies that are needed and that will cover all four of their schools.
“For technology, furniture and supplies we are still working that out,” he said, “We budgeted a number but I can’t say to you today that that’s exactly what it’s going to turn out to be. We looked at about $15,000 per classroom which is really on the high end,” he said, adding the number would be $240,000 for 16 sections.
“There is no way it will be exactly the same in each classroom because some classrooms already have the tables and some classrooms already have the technology that is already needed,” he said.
He said the goal there is to outfit every room exactly the same.
“Regardless of the school, we want all the kindergarten classrooms to offer kids the same look, the same feel, the same opportunities, the same access to technology equipment and materials,” he said.
He said in terms of transportation there are no additional costs.
“In fact, there’s a savings for us because we are eliminating the midday runs,” he said. “We do not need to add any routes. Everything can be accommodated with the already existing routes that we have.”
He said with their food service there are some costs there with additional lines and registers and maybe some tables in the cafeteria.
“That wouldn’t come out of our general budget that would come out of our cafeteria account,” he said.
Dr. Katz also discussed class size reductions.
“We came up with some ranges of what we thought were the class sizes we wanted to see in all of our schools,” he said.
In grades K-2, the range is 20-23 students; grades 3-5 range of 23-25 students; and in the middle school it was a maximum of 26-27 students.
“Class size reduction doesn’t mean that every time you are over you just add a teacher to that grade level because then there are class sizes that are not sustainable and then become very different from building to building,” he said.
Dr. Katz said the board looked at classes that were above the range in every section at a certain grade level.
“What that ends up with is hiring four teachers,” he said. “One at the middle school to accommodate math and that’s really to accommodate the bubble of our seventh grade and that would be an eighth grade math teacher. One teacher in Rogers. One teacher at Walter C. Black and one teacher at McKnight.”
He said so it’s basically all the elementary schools except the Perry L. Drew School.
“It doesn’t mean we are not giving attention to the Drew School it means that they have all of their classes in the ranges that we looked at already,” he said.
Dr. Katz said if the district budgets about $75,000 a teacher for salary plus benefits, that’s about $300,000.
Next, he discussed professional development.
“We are really trying to redesign the way we deliver professional development not only for our teachers but also for our school leaders,” he said. “There is definitely inconsistencies right now in the way things are approved. Inconsistencies in terms of which teachers receive which training within a grade level and the content areas.”
He said there are not as many opportunities for teachers to explore things that are of interest to them.
