Schools

Preliminary District Budget Has $500K Shortfall

Finance committee has until March 4 to decide whether to issue a second question on the ballot; elections will be April 27.

According to the preliminary budget information presented at the open finance committee meeting Monday night, the School District of the Chathams faces a budgetary shortfall of $494,980 outside of the 2 percent cap for the 2011-12 academic year.

Committee Chairman Alan Routh said the committee would make some “difficult decisions” in the coming weeks to determine where potential cuts could be made to make up for the gap. Some of the areas Routh said they would look at were:

  • Curriculum and instructional mandates, to examine if online instruction could be found at a reduced cost;
  • Equipment, especially sharing with local municipalities and perhaps with neighboring school districts;
  • Staffing; and
  • Additional revenue from the activity fee at the high school, or transportation.

Several other holes still exist in the budget, especially since the district will not know how much state aid it will receive this year. , the district learned it would lose about $128,000 in its state aid. In March 2010, , or 86.3 percent of its state aid from the 2009-10 academic year.

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The board will learn how much state aid the district will receive after Gov. Chris Christie gives his speech on the state budget on Feb. 22. Then the board must decide by March 4 whether to put forth a second question on the budget’s ballot for residents to approve the expense, because the question must be included in the preliminary budget that will be sent to the Morris County Executive Superintendent Kathleen Serafino.

Serafino can approve or disapprove the budget, or to make what Routh described as a “line item veto” on any item in the budget. For example, if a second question for $500,000 is included in the budget that is sent to Serafino, she can send the budget back to the district to find the $500,000 by cutting other resources and programs.

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“[Serafino] can say, ‘Here’s how you save money, take it out of here, there’s no second question,” School Superintendent Jim O’Neill said, calling the practice “very disconcerting.”

Routh said that when the district sent last year’s budget to the county superintendent, a budget that he said was “well within the law to [be put] in front of the taxpayers,” Serafino told them the allowance for increased enrollment was too much. She told them to decrease the enrollment allowance, even though there was a significant enrollment increase.

“It was a political decision,” Routh said. “Those kinds of things can still happen, and in fact that is one of the disadvantages of having a county superintendent with [that kind] of power and authority.”

For now, the board agreed that the best option would be to try to find the money by making tough decisions within the existing budget. “We are within $500,000 in a $55 million budget,” Routh said. “Over the next several weeks, we’ll have a much better idea of whether we’ll be within the cap and whether we need to consider a second question.”

The Budget Advisory Committee will hold open meetings on Feb. 15 and March 22 at the Chatham Township Municipal Building at 7 p.m., and the budget will be addressed again at the regular Board of Education meetings on Feb. 28 and March 28.

O’Neill will make budget presentations at the PTO meetings on the following dates:

  • March 8 at Milton Avenue School and Southern Boulevard School;
  • March 10 at Chatham Middle School;
  • March 17 at Lafayette Avenue School;
  • April 13 at Washington Avenue School; and
  • April 20 at Chatham High School.

The vote on the school district's budget will be held on April 27 from 2 to 9 p.m. Voters can register up until April 6 and request a mail ballot until April 20.


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