Phillipsburg School Board finalizes budget with additional staff cuts

Friday, March 26, 2010
By SARAH M. WOJCIK
The Express-Times

The school board unanimously passed a $51 million operating budget, reduced from the $52.4 million spending plan introduced Monday.

The changes came after the Warren County Department of Education ordered the elimination of an additional $794,585 to the budget.

Phillipsburg property owners would see taxes largely unchanged under the budget, despite a 31 percent drop in the school tax rate from $1.28 to 88 cents per $100 of assessed value.

That's because a townwide revaluation last year increased assessment on most properties.

The budget slashes 11 certified teachers and five support staff or classroom aides while researching the possibility of privatizing noninstructional staff such as security or maintenance.

Phillipsburg Education Association President Barbara English said it remains unclear where the cuts would be made, though the ranks of nontenured staff remain extremely small after deep cuts for the last two years.

The struggle between the school district and the county education office grew from a disagreement over the amount the district hoped to raise in tax revenue, also known as the tax levy.

Capped at 4 percent by the state, the school district proposed increasing the levy by about 51 percent, according to Warren County Executive Superintendent Kevin Brennan.

Districts are permitted to surpass the state's cap in certain circumstances such as a loss in state aid, but Brennan called the proposed increase excessive.

"One of the things we were concerned about is the significant shift to the taxpayer for the cost of running the school district," Brennan said.

Phillipsburg School Business Administrator William Bauer said the district was able to make such a large increase because of the town's property reassessment, which raised its collective property value by about $425 million.

Taxpayers, therefore, would not be burdened by the higher tax levy, he said.

"Because town had revaluated itself, we had an opportunity to become more self-reliant," Bauer said.

Brennan said the reassessment was not justification for avoiding a leaner budget.

"It does not take the responsibility away from the district to come up with a spending plan that's more financially responsible," he said Thursday night.

Brennan said he thought the district should re-examine reducing expenses in equipment, non-instructional operations and administration.

Superintendent Mark B. Miller said the district will examine areas that would least affect students.

"We had an amount of money we had to cut and we're going to be looking at a number of avenues to cut," Miller said.

Brennan sympathizes with Phillipsburg administrators, saying that as an administrator he, too, had "an insatiable" appetite for funding his district's initiatives.

"There's always a struggle between resources and needs and the strain between those two elements has never been greater," said Brennan, who had been Greenwich Township's schools superintendent before taking the county job.