Ithink that I know what our local school superintendents and business administrators are going through now as they prepare their budgets for the 2010-11 school year.A
recent series of events at Greater Media Newspapers placed me in the unfamiliar position of developing a budget for our entire editorial department for 2010. I was given a bottom line number to work with and realized one thing immediately — I could not find enough small items to cut to reach the target I was given.
That forced me to conclude there was only one real option available — laying off several people in order to save on salaries and benefits — to reach our department’s allotted expenses.
It was not a pleasant learning experience for a person who spends most of his time writing articles and editing other people’s work.
I bring this up as I consider the task now facing most New Jersey school superintendents, business administrators and board of education members.
Because of financial circumstances that are partly of their own making and partly a result of the economic times in which we find ourselves living, those administrators will have to do a lot of cutting in order to meet their budget requirements for the 2010-11 school year.
I think some of those administrators will come to the conclusion that there are no more small items to cut; they have stopped ordering textbooks; they have stopped buying new library books; they have eliminated art and music classes from the curriculum; they may have already cut some foreign language and advanced placement courses, field trips, extracurricular activities, possibly even a sports team or two, and still the bottom line has not been met.
So what is left to cut? People are left to cut and it may be time for school districts to start saying goodbye to teachers, administrators, support staff, and more. The salaries and benefits that some school employees carry are in many cases no longer sustainable by taxpayers footing the bill.
I have written about this before. I have asked how a first-year teacher in a New Jersey public school comes to be paid $45,000 to $50,000 with all of his/her health benefits paid for by the school district, when $30,000 to $35,000 a year and a payment toward health care costs should be what is offered to the new employee.
Journalists ask these questions among themselves because we wish we could have a deal like that. But now it is not just journalists who are asking these questions.
People who never took an interest in a school district’s salaries and benefits are asking me, and other reporters and editors, how a system was allowed to develop that guarantees an individual a large starting salary, an annual salary increase and free health coverage.
Now it is not just journalists peppering school superintendents, business administrators, school board members and teachers with annoying questions. They can ignore us and hope we go away. Now it is just about everyone outside Club Ed. who is really, really ticked off.
The Marlboro K-8 School District Board of Education had a chance to make a stand during recent contract negotiations with the Marlboro Township Education Association (MTEA).
The board wanted MTEA members to begin paying a portion of their health coverage. The union refused to budge on that point. In the end the board said it moved to a new health insurance plan that would save more money with the teachers paying nothing than it would have saved with the teachers paying toward their health care.
That deal may be great for a year or two, but I believe that those savings will quickly evaporate as the cost of the district’s health care plan continues to rise.
Had the Marlboro school board stuck to its demand for a payment for health coverage from the MTEA members, that change would have been forever. It also would have given other Garden State school board members the ability to say, “See, if Marlboro got its union to pay for health care so can we.”
You better believe the head honchos at the New Jersey Education Association were happy that the Marlboro school board found a health insurance plan they could sell to the public as a savings, with the upshot being that MTEA members still get their own and their family’s health care coverage for free.
But it will not matter. Soon, very soon, New Jersey school boards will find out what I found out during our budget preparations — that reaching the mandated bottom line by slicing nickels and dimes cannot be done. People will have to go, and when those people are laid off from work what will their hefty salaries and free health benefits be worth then?
Mark Rosman is a managing editor with Greater Media Newspapers. He may be reached at [email protected].