Amid discussions on the $128.9 million budget for the 2018-19 school year proposed earlier this month, the Hillsborough Township Board of Education unanimously approved an emergency resolution calling for changes to how the local fair share of state aid is calculated.
Crafted during the March 27 meeting, the emergency resolution petitions the New Jersey School Board Association’s Delegate Assembly, as well as its legislators and the state commissioner of education, to advocate for a change to the law in order to permit an exception of the 2 percent cap for districts that are taxing under the local fair share.
Following Superintendent Dr. Jorden Schiff’s introduction of the proposed 2018-19 budget, school board member Jean Trujillo lamented the district’s tight budgetary constraints due to the 2 percent tax levy cap and a lack of proportionate funding from the state.
“I don’t think the general public understands – I mean, I didn’t when I sat on the other side,” Trujillo said. “I see the budget and there’s no money. Everything’s taken up by the must-haves and we can’t allocate money.”
District officials said they were not necessarily advocating for districts like Hillsborough to raise taxes as much as they wanted, but rather to give those districts more breathing room in their budgets.
Since the 2012-13 school budget, the state aid provided to the Hillsborough Township Public School District has hovered at approximately $25 million, which is approximately $1 million less than it was in the 2009-10 school year.
That stagnation, officials said, doesn’t help the district when costs rise and the amount the district can raise through taxation stays within the 2 percent cap.
“Our focus [with the proposed budget] was to maintain what we currently have and we could barely do that,” Schiff said. “We cannot continue to move in this direction.”
Back in 2010, a majority of school districts throughout the state moved their board of education elections to November. The move was made with the concession that voters would no longer vote to approve a proposed budget if the tax levy remained below the 2 percent cap.
At that time, communities were in favor of the change, since merging school board elections with those held in November eliminated costs associated with going to the polls in April.
Nearly eight years after its passage, school board member Greg Gillette said changes to the tax levy cap may be necessary in the future.
“The tax levy cap is not designed for growing towns that are adding ratables – it’s designed for towns that are already built out,” Gillette said. “I think there is some legitimacy to changing the tax levy cap – as painful for me as it is to say that – but I think the resistance will be that there are mechanisms to go above the tax levy cap.”
Under state law, voters get a say on their local school district’s budget if it exceeds the tax cap. In the event that it does, officials would have to present a ballot referendum for the additional funds that November.
If the referendum passes, those funds are not made available to the district until the following January, which is months into the budget year. Schiff said a referendum cannot be used to raise money for teaching staff members or “thorough and efficient” parts of the budget, which include curriculum and paying staff.
Schiff said the district will likely need to go to the ballots for a construction referendum, due to existing needs for work on the schools’ HVAC systems and controls, roof repairs, boilers and other items.
“Since I’ve been on this board off and on since 2002, budgetary constraints have continuously made it nearly impossible for us to do the maintenance that we should do in a preventative sense and we’ve always had to be reactionary to our problems,” school board member Christopher Pulsifer said.
Though the emergency resolution originally pointed to that metric to determine potential funding adjustments, Gillette said the local fair share equation used to calculate state aid should be changed.
“We’re quite a bit under the local fair share and that’s the main driver of why we’ll never see an increase in state aid. The state won’t give more aid when you’re under your fair share,” Gillette said.
According to officials, the district was taxing approximately $6.7 million less than the local fair share last year. That figure, Schiff said, puts the district on an “unsustainable path” that would make budgeting more difficult in the coming years.
The proposed 2018-19 budget includes the reduction of four teachers at Hillsborough High School and one transitional primary teacher.
“One of the things that we did to make this [proposed] budget balanced is to strip contingencies,” Schiff said. “That’s very hard to do. You can’t do that every year.”
