By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
School taxes would go up in Princeton by 4.7 percent, based on a tentative $95.6 million budget that the Board of Education adopted Thursday despite concerns about the size of the hike., The district is taking advantage of waivers for rising health care costs and enrollment growth to raise taxes above the 2-percent-cap. At the average home assessment of $821,771, school taxes would rise by $223.95, figures showed this week., That hike is less than the roughly $360 increase the district was staring at around 10 day ago, along with a nearly $400,000 deficit that had to be closed. In the time between then and Thursday, the district cut some proposed spending by $147,570 and eliminated $248,545 worth of new staff requests., “We went back and we made some adjustments … to make the budget in balance,” school business administrator Stephanie Kennedy told board members., Yet the tax hike was weighing on the minds of the board, in a community where taxes are already high and where the district is expected to seek community support next year for a facilities bond referendum. One official talked about the message the district needs to send to the public., “So there’s a whole host of things I think that we have to think about over the longer term,” school board President Patrick Sullivan said. “It’s like, what is the conversation you want to have with people like that, with this community, about where we’re headed.”, The budget next has to be reviewed by the state Department of Education, before the board adopts the final version on April 25., During the roughly three-hour board meeting, officials returned to a familiar topic—the Princeton Charter School—and the impact of its phased-in enrollment growth. The Charter School got permission from acting Commissioner of Education Kimberley Harrington to add 76 more children, spread over two years. In this year’s budget, the district has set aside $826,266 for the expected first wave of 54 new children., Officials, though, raised the prospect of trying to negotiate with the Charter School to enroll fewer new students., Superintendent of Schools Stephen C. Cochrane, during the meeting, revealed details of a private conversation that he had had with Lawrence Patton, the head administrator at the Charter School. Cochrane said he had told Patton that “ ‘If the Charter School Trustees feel in their conscience that the right thing for the community would be to limit their expansion or implement it more gradually, then we would welcome that.’ ”, Cochrane said he would be willing to contact Patton and ask if the Charter School were thinking of doing that, “it would be really helpful for us, in our planning, if you did it before April 25 so we can adjust our budget accordingly.”, The one incentive Cochrane and the school board could offer the Charter School would be for the district to drop its legal challenge to the enrollment expansion., “That is always something valuable if you can get rid of a litigation. There’s certainty there,” said school board member William D. Hare, a lawyer and Charter School parent., Later, Sullivan said the Charter School Trustees should consider the school board’s offer to merge with the district “under one budget.”, “They don’t have, obviously, a legal obligation to do that,” he said, “but as members of the community and with their taking community funding, I think they have sort of a moral obligation to consider that and at least think about what that might look like.”, The district provides the Charter School with about $5 million annually; the addition of 76 more children will mean an extra $1.16 million more per year., Sullivan said having the Charter School part of the district would save about $6 million, “but we’d spend that money, of course.” Cochrane, though, said he could not say for certain what the savings would be., The school district has said it was blind-sided by the Charter School’s plan to expand its enrollment. To better improve communication, board member Betsy Baglio raised whether the Charter School trustees would be interested in having a Princeton School board member sit on the Charter School’s governing body., “I think we could all learn so much more if we work together,” she said., For his part, Paul Josephson, president of the Charter School Board, said Friday that his side “has extended the hand to get together and we look forward to hearing from them and having those conversations.” He stopped short of taking a position on any proposal the school board made Thursday., “We’ve asked them to come and sit and talk,” he said. “If what they said (Thursday) night means that we’re going to sit down and have a conversation, we look forward to that.”
