Ridgewood School Budget Vote Is Tuesday: What You Need To Know

RIDGEWOOD, NJ — Village residents will be asked to reject or approve the school district's nearly $111.7 million budget Tuesday.

The budget includes a $96 million tax levy, the portion of the budget funded by local taxes, and a $174 tax increase for a home valued at $702,000, the average in Ridgewood.

The Board of Education in March voted to use a $150,000 increase in state aid on tax relief. The district's total state aid was nearly $5.49 million.

Superintendent Daniel Fishbein proposed using the aid increase to promote seven part-time high school teaches to full-time, but the board opted to put it toward debt service.

About $77 million of the budget will fund salaries and benefits.

Included in the budget is $1.6 million for technology, which includes replacing aging computers, Chromebooks, and projects. The fund will also be used to maintain hardware to "keep up with modern day educational techniques and software requirements."

Also budgeted is $1.65 million to renovate four bathrooms at Benjamin Franklin and George Washington middle schools, replacing the stadium turf field at the high school, repaving parking lots throughout the district, and repairing the Benjamin Franklin pole vault and javelin area

The budget includes curriculum studies of the kindergarten through fifth grade language arts program, including new classroom library books, the sixth through 12th grade math curriculum, including the renewal e-textbooks licenses, and two new junior high and high school courses.

All academic courses, including 26 Advanced Placement classes, five world languages, 29 high school varsity sports, and more than 100 activities will continue if the budget is approved.

Ridgewood is just one of 13 districts statewide with a budget vote. The vote was taken away from residents in 2013 when the school board moved school elections to November, until the Village Council restored the vote last summer.

Voters will only decide on the budget and not the next member of the school board. That election will not occur until the spring of 2020. The school district filed a complaint in court, who pushed the election date back to next year.

Email: daniel.hubbard@patch.com