School District Proposes Cutting 20 Jobs to Balance Budget

The South Orange-Maplewood School District may cut 20 full-time positions to close a $3.1 million budget gap for the 2011-2012 school year.

The 20 positions to be eliminated would save an estimated $1.4 million. The other $1.7 million would come from non-personnel reductions including energy, operations and maintenance, materials and supplies, technology, transportation and out of district tuition.

In presenting the draft budget, Superintendent of Schools Brian Osborne noted that the budget might need to be adjusted after Feb. 24 when the district receives its state aid numbers from Trenton. Right now, the draft budget is counting on $2.2 million in state aid (including $214,984 in Federal EdJobs stimulus funding).

Osborne noted that he is working with a 2% state-mandated tax levy cap this year. Last year, the of nearly 3.5% and has approved higher levies in previous years. Osborne said that it is still possible that the district could be granted an exception to the levy cap due to enrollment increases.

Working with a cap of 2%, district staff calculated total revenues of $109,050,874 for the 2011-12 school year — just 0.3% more than in 2010-11. Osborne noted that the loss of even one tax point was significant, as a tax point equals approximately $1 million.

Conversely, anticipated expenses for 2011-12 totalled $112,244,437 — creating a shortfall of $3,193,563. The three largest cost drivers were salaries (budgeted to rise from $55,397,416 to $56,504,940), health and dental insurance (from $11,085,084 to $12,537,776) and tuition expenses for special needs students requiring out of district programs (from $8,168,737 to $8,985,610).

To close the gap, Osborne proposed making the following non-personnel cuts:

However, the non-personnel cuts would only save $1.7 million, necessitating an additional $1.4 million in personnel reductions. Osborne proposed the followed reductions in personnel:

Osborne explained that he hoped to attain many of the personnel reductions through attrition. He said the six Columbia High teaching positions to be eliminated would be achieved through reducing the number of sections by creating larger class sizes. Four of the cuts would be teaching positions; two would be physical education.

Osborne particularly lamented eliminating 5 full-time clerical positions at the elementary schools and making those jobs part-time. Osborne said the the new positions would be less than half time so that the workers did not qualify for health care benefits — he called this move a "brutal reality" of the district's budget situation.

Osborne explained that the savings to out of district tuition would not mean any alteration in serving a child's IEP (individual education plan); rather it was being accomplished through the reapplication of discretionary IDEA funds to these tuitions. He also noted that the district was having success receiving reimbursements for out of district placements through extraordinary aid awards from the state.

Still, Osborne had more dire news: "Any cut not on this list is not off the table. We may need it next week, certainly next year."

He added, "We are not going to see less kids but we are going to have less resources and less people to make it work. We're going to have to think more creatively. We can't be protectionist of the status quo. Innovation long-term is our only salvation."

After Osborne's presentation, Board President Mark Gleason said he supported the budget but said, "If we do get a cut in state aid — which I think is likely — we will need to make more cuts."

Gleason also added that he supported the 2% cap. "There is a lot of tax stress in this community. I wouldn't support going higher than 2% even if we got the exception." Gleason said that the South Orange Maplewood School District had been a "big spending district" for many years, and that those big expenditures were now making it difficult to cut back.

Gleason was also unhappy with the way the budget was being handled in the long-term. "We're just cutting. We're not re-engineering the way we're doing things." Interestingly, Gleason said that the district needed to make major capital expenditures in order to create a streamlined district for the future. "We can't get from here to there with our current facilities."

Facilities Chair Beth Daugherty noted that the board was hiring an architectural firm to create a long-term facilities plan for the next 20 to 30 years.

"We are going in that direction," said Daugherty.