District May Require Staff Lay Offs

The Board of Education is wrestling with a budget shortfall for 2011-2012 and staff reductions could be possible in order to bridge that gap.

Last week, School Business Administrator Bernard Giuliana told the school board he is working on ways to cope with a $5.264 million budget short fall just a week before the spending plan was supposed to be introduced.

Mr. Giuliana has not released a final budget or tax rate yet, but said last week the 2011-2012 spending plan would be $131.470 million. However, the estimated revenue is $126.206 million, and finding ways to trim the plan is impossible because the current budget is so lean.

“There is no trimming. These are cuts, hard cuts,” he told the school board Thursday. “We will have staff reductions for this budget.”

During his presentation, Giuliana recapped a tumultuous 2011, when two cuts in state aid left the district scrambling.

In 2010, state aid was cut mid-year by $5.413 million, with $404,000 eventually restored after an appeal.

Just a few months later, for the 2011 school year, the district took a $6.6 million cut to aid, and lost an additional $423,969 to the School Development Authority. It also had to deal with a required $1.3 million payment for a new charter school, and an additional $2.4 million in cuts from the Township Council. The council made the cuts following the budget’s defeat by voters in April.

All of which makes finding several small cuts to make difficult, and the idea of larger cuts, including staff, more likely.

On the plus side, Giuliana commended members of the teachers union and administrators union for contributing 1.5 percent to their health benefits plans and for calling for salary freeze. In addition, the district has worked to find a less expensive benefits plan and increased co-pays.

Last year’s $129.063 million plan was almost $6,000 less than the previous year, and carried a school tax rate of $5.688 per $100 of assessed valuation. Under that rate, the owner of a home assessed at $100,000 paid $5,688 in school taxes for the 2010-2011 school year.