$37,000
cut from budget proposal
School board targets personnel.
Friday, May 06, 2005 • By ANDREA EILENBERGER •
The Express-Times
WASHINGTON -- School board and borough
officials agreed on $37,000 in cuts to the recently defeated
school budget.
The new plan brings the property tax rate
to 93.7 cents per $100 of assessed value, which is 1 cent
lower than it would have been under the defeated plan,
Superintendent Lance Rosza said.
It eliminates one part-time preschool
teacher and makes one full-time social worker part time but
does not affect academic programs, he said.
"We could have cut money from programs,
but that would have negatively impacted the students," he
said. "It's always difficult when you have to cut money, but
there was little else to look at besides
personnel."
Under the new plan, a resident who owns a
home at the borough's average assessed value of $141,000
will pay $14 less in school taxes than they would have under
the defeated plan. A resident whose home is assessed at the
borough average could expect to pay $1,321 in school taxes
next year. Under the board's defeated plan, the same
resident would have paid $1,335.
After voters turned down the board's
$6,993,751 plan, Rosza and several board members met with
municipal officials to determine where cuts were possible.
Borough officials recommended cutting a total of $37,000 and
were open to board members' suggestions as to where to make
the cuts, Rosza said.
The county superintendent of schools now
must review the new plan before it is adopted. The district
will save $36,600 with the personnel cuts and plans to save
another $400 in heating and electricity costs.
"The board made some suggestions, and
these are what we agreed to," borough Manager Richard Sheola
said at Tuesday night's council meeting.
School board president Donna Golda said
when the district budget was defeated two years ago, borough
officials suggested the board take $76,000 out of its
surplus.
"Sometimes that's the easy way to do it,
but they understood that this year we just couldn't do
that," Golda said. "They were very understanding of our
predicament."
State legislation passed in 2004 limits
the amount of a district's surplus, and it is capped at
about 2 percent for 2005-06 budgets.
Reporter Andrea Eilenberger can be reached at
908-475-8044 or by e-mail at aeilenberger@express-times.com.
© 2005 The Express-Times. Used with
permission.
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