It is never too early to start planning a school district budget, according to Patrick DeGeorge, and a first look at the Freehold Borough K-8 School District’s 2011-12 budget is showing an estimated shortfall of $354,144 for the district.
According to state law, school districts must operate with a balanced budget. Therefore, district administrators are attempting to figure out ways to account for that projected deficit.
DeGeorge, who is the district’s business administrator, presented information about the 2011-12 budget to the Freehold Borough Board of Education during a recent meeting. He discussed the process of planning a budget and said it is a 12-month project.
“Sometimes I think people believe I shut myself up in a room in my house for a long weekend and come out on Monday morning with a planned budget. That is not the way it works,” DeGeorge said.
“The process of creating and enacting a school budget is an ongoing thing. We discussed what could happen or what we could do if this or that happened. We spoke about how to increase revenue and discussed decreasing expenditures to make it all work with a 2 percent cap.
“Generally, in a district like this with an increase in enrollment, the governor will say, ‘You can go over the 2 percent cap, but you won’t get it from me (the state). Get it from the taxpayers,’ ” DeGeorge said.
The Freehold Borough school district’s budget for the current 2010-11 academic year totals $17.3 million, with revenues to match those appropriations.
The estimated budget for 2011-12 totals $17.6 million, with estimated revenues listed at $17.3 million. The projected shortfall is $354,144.
School officials have between now and April — when the 2011-12 budget is placed before voters — to figure out a way to make the revenues equal the appropriations.
DeGeorge listed several options to address the shortfall, including asking the governor for more state aid and seeking waivers to increase local school taxes beyond permissible limits.
Other options could include decreasing appropriations by increasing operational efficiency, increasing the sharing of services where possible, further privatizing services and, as a last resort, eliminating programs and staff, according to DeGeorge.
In regard to operating efficiencies, the administrator said he will look at using fewer supplies and determining what and where the district can do with less.
“If there is still a deficiency, then we will move to more shared services,” he said.
DeGeorge said he meets once a month with business administrators from surrounding school districts and with Borough Administrator Joseph Bellina to discuss the possibility of increasing shared services.
Currently, the municipality of Freehold Borough provides snow removal, grass cutting and gasoline for the K-8 school district, which includes three schools and has a total enrollment of about 1,400 pupils.
“We are working on getting shared services for transportation (for pupils who attend school out of the district) and maintenance. These are two big issues,” he said.
He said privatization in certain areas is also a possibility to save money. He noted that the district’s cafeteria services are provided by a private vendor. The district previously operated the school cafeterias.
Privatization of the cafeterias “has been much more efficient and has saved us money. It is a big win for us. We will look into other areas to privatize as well. We continue to try to retain a thorough and efficient education for our students by doing creative things,” DeGeorge said.
The last option to be pursued would be cutting staff and programs, he said.
“We will also be discussing at meetings how shared services, privatization and, if necessary, cutting staff and programs will impact our district. We know we cannot give a zero (tax) increase to property owners this coming year, but we are essentially backed into a corner and the governor has told us, ‘You raise the taxes, not me,’ ” De- George said.
Do you have an opinion about this issue? Letters to the editor may be sent via email to [email protected].