Proposed School Budget Carries 3-Cent Tax Increase

During a special meeting held Monday night (Feb. 27), members of the Lawrence Township Board of Education gave their approval for the district’s proposed 2012-2013 school year budget to be sent to Mercer County’s executive county superintendent of schools for review.

If approved by the executive county superintendent, the $67.17 million budget – which carries a 3-cent increase to Lawrence Township’s school tax rate – will be returned to the township school board for formal adoption at an official budget hearing held before the public on March 29 at Lawrence High School.

The proposed budget includes no staff layoffs.

The 3-cent hike would increase Lawrence Township’s school tax rate to $2.36 per $100 of assessed property value, meaning that the owner of a home assessed at the township average of $160,828 would pay about $3,795.54 in school taxes this year, or about $48 more than last year.

District Superintendent Crystal Lovell and Business Administrator Thomas Eldridge both explained to the board and the members of the public in attendance at the meeting that the 3-cent increase is solely the result of the by residential and commercial property owners.

“If it had not been for the [drop in] ratables, mathematically we would actually have a tax rate decline,” Eldridge said.

“The loss in ratables is what’s driving the 3 cents,” Lovell said. “There’s really no increase coming from the school district.”

The proposed 2012-2013 budget is about $2.3 million larger than the current school year’s $64.87 million budget. While cost increases include staff salaries and out-of-district tuition for students with special needs, more than $1 million of that amount comes in the form of capital reserve and capital outlay, according to Eldridge.

“The capital reserve is not an expenditure that goes out. A capital reserve is an expenditure that comes back into us. What we do is we take this $900,000 and we actually pay ourselves with it. We send it over to another set of books called our Repayment of Debt and we use that as a revenue source there to buy down taxes that we’d otherwise have to raise,” Eldridge explained, adding that the $103,826 capital outlay increase in the 2012-2013 budget is to cover the costs of a new heating/air conditioning unit for Lawrence High School.

In addition to using more than $5.6 million of district surplus funds as revenue, the proposed 2012-2013 budget includes $3,337,252 in state aid. That amount for the 2012-2013 school year is an increase of $1,088,220 over the amount of state aid that was used in the current school year budget.

(The district initially was given $2,249,032 in state aid for 2011-2012. after the 2011-2012 budget was adopted was placed into the district’s surplus fund for use in the 2012-2013 budget.)

Despite the increase for the 2012-2013 school year, however, state aid is still below the amount –$4,935,581 – Lawrence Township received for the 2009-2010 school year, Lovell noted. “We’re still not where we were three years ago. I get happy when I get extra money, but I have to keep it in perspective. We’re still operating with less state aid this year than we had three years ago. That’s important for people to understand,” she said.

“This budget does not represent any proposed layoffs or cuts in positions,” Lovell said. “However, we may redistribute our human capital to meet our student needs. What that means is if [for example] we have four second-grades and we find out next year we only have need for three second-grades but we need an additional third-grade, we will take the second-grade teacher and move the second-grade teacher to the third-grade classroom. That’s a redistribution of existing personnel based on student needs.”

Lovell explained that the proposed budget was crafted over a period of several months to meet the district’s obligations under local, state and federation regulations and legislation, and includes input collected in a variety of ways from members of the Lawrence Township community, students and their parents, and district administrators, teacher and other staff.

“So we took all of that information and put it together to create our budget,” the superintendent said, explaining that the goal was to “strike a reasonable balance” that took into consideration both the economic hardships taxpayers face – such as unemployment and rising municipal taxes – and the needs of students. “We [did] a self-examination of what’s a need and what’s a want, and how do we manage our needs and our wants to do what’s best for our students. That’s the balance that we tried to strike when we were developing the budget.”

Lovell reiterated that district’s five-year strategic plan – which went into effect in September 2010 and runs through June 2015 – is focused on four main goals: fiscal responsibility, academic equity and excellence, community engagement and technology for the future.

“These goals drive everything we do,” she said. “All of our budget conversations, we pull them back to ‘Where is that in the strategic plan? Where does that take us in terms of meeting our goal?’ So this is our foundation for developing our objectives. Anytime we have a budget question, we always go to the strategic plan and say, ‘Where is it in the plan? Is it part of the plan?’”

Lovell also noted that the proposed budget falls more than $483,000 under the state’s 2 percent tax levy cap. “We are under cap. That goes back to my needs versus my wants. Again, I try to practice here what I practice at home. Just because we have that available – we can go up to cap – it doesn’t mean that’s necessarily what we should do. So in this particular case, when we were doing our budget, we stayed true to looking at the strategic plan and we did our budget based on what we needed.”

Eldridge added that 2011-2012 budget was also under cap. “We banked $2.3 million in cap that we didn’t spend. So for two years in a row we’ve been underneath the cap – significantly under the cap… It’s something to be said that we were able, with all of the work of the board and people taking the initiatives they took, to hold down that growth in appropriations.”

Lovell called it “a pretty good budget given everything that has changed, some of the initiatives that have happened, and some of the mandates that have come down. We’ve still managed to do pretty well in terms of keeping things in order, and offering excellent programs, expanding some programs in some cases, and not having any layoffs… In these economic times, we still want to offer the excellent programs that we have been offering.

“We’re still moving forward with all of our initiatives but being very, very, very mindful of the dollars that we spend and making sure that we get quality for the dollars that we do spend,” she said.

Board member Michael Brindle pointed out that the numbers included in the proposed budget discussed Monday may change slightly by the time the official budget hearing is held on March 29. He encouraged members of the public with questions or concerns to reach out to the district administration or school board as soon as possible.

“It’s important that the public understands that tonight we are not adopting a budget that is cast in stone, that this budget adoption is to send the budget to the county superintendent for their overview, approval, suggestions,” Brindle said. “It then comes back to the board with their input. At the [March 29] meeting we then adopt the budget which then is cast in stone and that’s the one that goes on the ballot that the public gets to vote on. So if you’ve got a concern or question do not wait.”

The school budget vote and school board election will be held on Tuesday, April 17, with polls open from 7 a.m. until 9 p.m.

(Legislation signed into law by Gov. Chris Christie in January allows local school boards to move elections from April to November to coincide with the state’s general election. On Feb. 13, the Lawrence Township school board .) 

In other business conducted at Monday’s special meeting, school board members approved a resolution authorizing the district administration to complete negotiations to buy a warehouse in Ewing Township for use as the district’s maintenance shop/storage facility.

The purchase price will be $875,000 and will be paid for with funds that the district has already saved, having started to put money away to buy property for such a purpose about five years ago. Currently, the district rents a different storage facility in Ewing, at an annual cost of $80,000.