By Geoffrey Wertime, Staff Writer
BORDENTOWN TOWNSHIP — About 150 people attended the Board of Education’s March 18 meeting, many of them opposing a plan to abolish or limit the hours of most aide positions within the district.
The motion passed 9-0, with board President Brian Lynch absent.
Parents, aides, and a Brownie troop led by Parent-Teacher Organization President Lori Boberg attended, bearing signs that read “Save our aides!”
Prior to the vote, parents, professionals and a student drew applause when they spoke, most of them against the board’s plan. The plan cut transportation and copy aides, as per state regulations, and switched many classroom aide positions to part-time.
While some earlier critics seemed appeased, others said they were still unhappy with the plan.
Karen Poirier, a Fieldsboro resident, said as a teacher in a mixed classroom in a different district that does not employ aides, “it is the most difficult thing to do.
“I don’t understand, when we’re an educational system, (how) you could reduce the force of the aides that work, especially with our special education students,” she said. “To me, financial consideration is not something that needs to be looked at with this.”
She said she is the mother of two girls in the district, one of them in special education.
Carla Lippincott, another parent with two children in special education in the district, expressed similar concerns.
“How are you going to make sure nothing is compromised for my child?” she asked the board.
Officials have said previously that the plan is the result of the district’s need to reduce its budget. Last year’s budget was defeated, leading to $702,000 in cuts.
Still, the board has not been deaf to the public outcry. After 75 people showed up to protest the aide cuts at the board’s March 4 meeting, the district reworked its plan slightly, and Business Administrator Peggy Ianoale said it will now only reduce the force among the 24 paraprofessionals hired after July 1, 2008.
The district sent out a letter to the aides letting them know about the plan, and that the 50 hired before the cut-off date “(will) have a job, they just might not necessarily have the same job,” she said Friday. Originally, the plan was to reconsider every aide and rehire based on seniority.
The change, she said, “guarantees a larger percentage of people they will have a job.” The district is still cutting the funding of its aide staff by $428,000 from this year’s paraprofessional budget of about $1 million.
The savings will come from cutting 11 of the district’s 30 full-time classroom aides and replacing them with similar part-time positions, which will increase from two to a projected 40. The district’s seven full-time and single part-time one-to-one special education aides are unaffected.
Additionally, new state accountability regulations necessitated the cutting of five full-time clerical aides and nine full-time aides who rode the buses with students, the latter of whose responsibilities will be distributed among the remaining paraprofessionals.
Bordentown Township resident Dave Valeri, an educator for over 20 years, also objected to the plan during public comment, saying it would make it difficult for the district to meet other state regulations.
“You’ve made the comment before that the district wants to do more with less,” he said. “It’s my professional opinion that if it moves ahead with the proposed budget, it’s going to be doing less with less.”
Even students got involved in the issue. One of the sign-hauling girls in Brownie Troop 23817, third-grade Clara Barton student Eliza Peterson, presented the board with a petition bearing 100 signatures asking to keep the paraprofessionals employed.
Others were less critical of the board’s proposal.
Reba Snyder, longtime president of the Bordentown Regional Education Association and an instructional aide for special education, said her earlier concerns about the retirement benefits of several of the more senior employees had been put largely to rest.
Yet she said she was not completely satisfied, particularly with the plan to have all the current paraprofessionals reapply for whatever slots are available next year.
“I personally am a little offended that after 38 years I have to write a letter of interest to keep my position,” she said.
The district has maintained the cuts are in the best interest of the students, and that next year’s positions will be based on students’ Individualized Education Plans. Superintendent Constance Bauer has said there will be as many employees next year as this year, though many will be in “restructured” positions.
