By Joanne Degnan, Staff Writer
MILLSTONE The $31.67 million tentative school budget for 2011-2012 adopted Monday night proposes no increase in the tax levy needed to run the K-8 district next year, but residents will still pay an average $296 more in school taxes due mainly to the fallout from the state’s ruling on last year’s budget appeal.
The Board of Education voted 8-0 to adopt the tentative budget and send it to the executive county superintendent of schools for review. A public hearing on the budget is scheduled for March 28, and the spending plan goes to the voters to decide on Wednesday, April 27.
”The budget that’s been presented so far is the result of a single board directive: craft a budget with a zero percent increase to the tax levy, and you’ve done that,” Board of Education President Kevin McGovern told interim Schools Superintendent John Szabo after the budget presentation.
In the coming weeks, however, there will be a “vigorous discussion” about the school board’s priorities for next year and how the available funds are allocated within the proposed budget, Mr. McGovern said.
Several board members questioned whether the $68,000 budgeted for updating 10-year-old textbooks and other curriculum supplies was sufficient and expressed dismay that the art program for students in the primary school, which was a casualty of the last budget crisis, was not being restored.
Dr. Szabo said reducing class sizes at the primary and elementary schools was a higher priority than restoring the art program, although he ideally would have liked to do both. The tentative budget for 2011-2012 provides funds to hire two new teachers for next year’s first and fourth grades, which otherwise would have had as many as 25 and 28 students, respectively, in each classroom, he said.
Scheduling changes could be used to find the funding to restore a guidance counselor at the middle school, which currently has one counselor for 571 students due to last year’s budget cuts, Dr. Szabo said in response to another question.
Even though the tentative 2011-2012 budget holds the $23.37 million tax levy to a zero increase, taxpayers are still facing a tax increase because of the district’s successful appeal of $960,683 in budget cuts made by the Township Committee after voters defeated the 2010-2011 school budget last April. The state’s acting education commissioner ruled in the school board’s favor in September, six months after the appeal was filed, but by then the final tax rate had already been struck and property tax bills sent out. The school board had to borrow the money it was owed in tax revenue in order to get through the current operating year and has spent about $800,00 of the $960,683, Dr. Szabo said. The loan will be repaid once the district has the tax revenue from last year’s budget appeal in hand.
The budget appeal outcome will cost a Millstone resident with a home assessed at the township average of $511,000 about $277 more in school taxes, Dr. Szabo said. Debt service, which is outside the general fund budget that residents vote on in school elections, will raise taxes about $19 on the same home, bringing the total increase to $296, he said.
The original budget proposal presented by Dr. Szabo in January would have raised the general fund tax levy by 1.87 percent, which was within the state’s new 2 percent cap law but unacceptable to the school board because it would have been on top of the $296 increase residents were already facing due to the prior year’s budget appeal and the increase in debt service costs.
After the initial budget presentation, the board asked Dr. Szabo and Business Administrator Bernie Biesiada to come up with a plan that held the tax levy flat, resulting in the tentative budget that was presented on Monday night.
