SAYREVILLE – The Sayreville School District Board of Education has introduced a $102 million budget that will fund the operation of the district during the 2019-20 school year.
Following a discussion among district administrators and board members, the budget was introduced on March 19. A public hearing is scheduled for May 7.
The budget, which may be revised until that time, may be adopted by the board following the public hearing.
The budget will be supported by a tax levy of $66.9 million to be paid by the borough’s residential and commercial property owners. Other revenue includes $2 million from the district’s surplus fund (savings) and $28 million in state aid (up from $25.5 million in 2018-19).
The $95 million budget adopted by the board for the 2018-19 school year was supported by a tax levy of $65.4 million and $24.4 million in state aid.
However, the district’s state aid allocation for 2018-19 changed in mid-2018 following negotiations between Gov. Phil Murphy and leaders in the state Legislature, which resulted in a law that raised the district’s state aid for the current school year to $25.5 million, increasing the total budget to $97 million.
In 2018, the average home in Sayreville had an estimated assessment of $144,724 and the 2018-19 school tax rate was $2.8513 per $100 of assessed valuation. The owner of that home paid about $4,126 in school taxes.
For 2019, the average home is estimated to remain at $144,724 and the school tax rate in 2019-20 is estimated to increase to $2.9164 per $100 assessed valuation. The owner of that home will pay $4,220 in school taxes, an increase of $94.
Individuals pay more or less in taxes depending on the assessed value of their home and/or property. School taxes are one component of a property owner’s tax bill, which also includes Middlesex County taxes and Sayreville municipal taxes.
Board President Kevin Ciak, board vice President Anthony Esposito, and board members Lucy Bloom, Christopher Callahan, Carrie Kenny, Karen Rubio and John Walsh voted “yes” on introducing the budget. Board members Daniel Balka and Phyllis Batko voted “no”.
“For a few years now, the administration and myself have had a different view of fiscal responsibility,” Balka said. “The last two years, the state gave us additional aid and I believe that too much of that additional aid is being spent on recurring expenses and not enough money is going into the classrooms. I have concerns that projects are being jumped into without proper planning and research being done. For example, we recently purchased metal detectors and after they were received we then found out that we did not have an adequate number of staff to efficiently use them for the arrival process, which is why we made all our part-time campus monitors full-time and hired additional ones.
“This new budget also included an additional physical education teacher because our physical education teachers only teach five periods rather than the usual six that most non-core subject teachers do,” he continued. “This is supposedly being done so those teachers can work duty periods like lunch, but I feel this is something the campus monitors should be doing. It is much more economical to have our campus security monitors work a lunch duty than our teachers.
“The most recent budgets have continued to add more administrative positions, instead of teachers that could reduce class sizes. I am concerned that if the state continues not to meet its revenue projections, we will be seeing a cut in state aid like so many other districts had recently and that will put us in a spot where we would have to consider cutting staff and that would be detrimental to providing high quality education that the residents of Sayreville deserve,” Balka said.
Batko said her reasonings were because “[F]or the past few years we have received millions of dollars in additional state aid and have continually gone over the 2 percent cap for the tax levy. While I understand the increases in security expenditures, there has been too much money allocated for additional administrative jobs. There have been increases in directors and assistants.
“Additional physical education teachers have been added because the superintendent changed the rules to allow physical education teachers to teach five classes instead of six classes,” she said. “This money would have been better spent to decrease class sizes for the core subjects. There has been an over collection and allocation for prescription benefits and there have been no refunds made to the employees or the taxpayers of the surplus funds.”
After the budget’s introduction, Superintendent of Schools Richard Labbe said, “We are very pleased that the Sayreville Board of Education approved the Preliminary 2019-20 school district budget and are hopeful that we will not need to make any augmentations to it before asking the board to formally adopt it after the budget public hearing, which is scheduled for Tuesday, May 7.
“We are also very appreciative and grateful for the support and consultation that we received from our board finance committee, our district and building level administrators, faculty, staff and the community,” he continued. “As always, their feedback and collaboration was invaluable to the process that we used to put together a comprehensive budget that will continue to responsibly provide our district with the funds necessary to accomplish the goals that we identified in our 2017-20 strategic action plan, and to address the other curriculum and instruction, culture and climate, facilities and infrastructure, and technology needs that we currently have, so that we can continue to promote the most positive outcomes for all our students.”
