School Officials Work to Trim Budget In Advance of Council's Review

Although the fate of the Lawrence Township school district’s voter-rejected 2012-2013 school year budget now legally rests in the hands of the township’s governing body, school administrators and school board members are not sitting idle.

Instead of waiting for Lawrence Township Council members to review the school budget line by line and suggest cuts in the wake , school district officials have been working hard trying to figure how to trim the budget in a way that would have the least impact on students.

 “The [district’s] Finance Committee met for a long time yesterday [Thursday]. We’re just trying to be proactive about this and get this resolved as quickly as possible. So what we are doing is we’re taking the prerogative of proposing our own cuts,” Laura Waters, president of the Lawrence Township Board of Education, told Lawrenceville Patch on Friday (April 20).

“We have identified specific cuts that we – the Finance Committee – will be recommending to the board. What our goal has been is to make cuts that won’t have any impact on the classroom, to keep the cuts are far from the classroom as possible,” she said. “We’ve identified a way to do that by consolidating positions, cutting supplies, and deferring a few big purchases that we had budgeted for in the failed budget.”

She added that staff layoffs were not being considered at this point.

“We did come in at about a half-million dollars below cap [in the rejected budget]. And there’s actually a limit to how low we can go,” Waters said. “We would be in violation of state law if we cut too much. This budget that everyone voted on on Tuesday increased our school levy by about $660,000 over last year. The cuts that we are going to propose to the board would cut about half of that, about $375,000, and what that would do is it would bring us back to the tax levy in 2009.”

It was not immediately clear what that reduction of $375,000 from the budget would do to the school tax rate which, had the budget been approved, would have increased by 3 cents to $2.36 per $100 of assessed property value.

Under state law, whenever a school budget is rejected by voters, the budget is sent to the governing body of the municipality for review. While it can recommend specific cuts, the governing body ultimately directs the school district to reduce the overall budget by a specific dollar amount. The district, in turn, than can make whatever cuts it deems appropriate provided that those cuts add up to the ordered amount, or the district can file an appeal with the state’s education commissioner.

“The town council is supposed to go through our budget line item by line item and then recommend to us specific line item cuts and a specific number,” Waters said. “We feel like we want to move more swiftly and we’d like to urge the council to come up to our speed because we feel that it’s in the interest of the students and the teachers and the district and the whole community that we get this resolved as quickly as possible.”

In accordance with the law, Waters said, the district last week provide township council with a copy of the defeated budget, information about employee salaries and contractual obligations, details about district’s long-range facilities plan, and other data. She said Superintendent Crystal Lovell and Business Administrator Tom Eldridge have a meeting set up for tomorrow, Tuesday, April 24, with Lawrence Township Manager Richard Krawczun.

Waters noted that, following the budget’s defeat, Lovell met with district administrators, principals and supervisors, and sent out an informational letter to all district staff. Information about the budget review process is also being posted on the district’s website and sent out to community members to the district’s QuickNews email service.

“We’re keeping everything really open,” Water said. “Our focus is on moving quickly and being proactive and working with the community and town council to come to a resolution that is satisfactory and keeps the cuts away from the students.”

 “We are hopeful that we can work collaboratively with Town Council to develop some preliminary reductions and deferrals that would minimize the impact on children,” Lovell said in the most recent update posted on the district website Friday. “This week we met with central office administrators, principals, assistant principals, and supervisors to review the budget and develop our recommendations. We also met with the BOE finance committee to review the preliminary reductions and deferrals. We will present our recommendations during our meeting on April 24.”

While the district’s Finance Committee includes four members of the school board, any formal decision to make cuts to the budget would have to be done through a vote of the full school board. Following the election that took place last week, the school board will hold its reorganization meeting this Wednesday, April 25, at 7 p.m. in the library of the high school.

By law, the revised budget must be adopted by the school board by May 21.  

Anyone with questions about the budget revision process can send an email to school administrators at TheFacts@ltps.info.

For School Budget and School Board Background, See:

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