What's going on at CHS ???

What the heck is going on at CHS? The school is being decimated by budget cuts and faculty being let go.

I thought we paid enough in taxes !!

We pay too much in taxes, but that doesn't mean that the schools get enough money given the situation we are in. (Few commercial ratables, aging buildings and other infrastructure, heterogeneous student population, rapidly increasing healthcare costs for staff ...)

Very little if any State Aid = extremely high school taxes. Caps on school spending + increased costs for just about everything = hard choices the School Board has to make to keep our schools functioning. These choices almost always result in cuts to existing services. This has been going on for years and will most likely get worse unless there is some school funding reform at the State level that impacts positively on our school district.

All the more reason to formally unite the towns and cut back on duplicate spending. South Mountain, NJ would be a wonderful town.

BubbaTerp said:

All the more reason to formally unite the towns and cut back on duplicate spending. South Mountain, NJ would be a wonderful town.

The school district is a single district, as in "formally united". It has been for a long time, and I think that's been the case before the municipalities were separate governments. Whether a merger or some kind of shared services for municipal services is a different issue, and has been discussed independent of discussing the schools.

Magnet schools on a regional basis perhaps through a shared service agreement subscribed to by multiple districts in the region on the other hand would make sense and would allow for broader offerings than individual districts can now provide. In region special education services for example could save the cost of transportation plus private school fees while being more responsive to individual needs. ESOL classes broken down by 1st language spoken, remedial education, foreign language offerings, career prep at the high school level, enrichment programs, extra curricular offerings, etc. would be much more doable with a larger student pool and combined financial resources.

BubbaTerp said:

All the more reason to formally unite the towns and cut back on duplicate spending. South Mountain, NJ would be a wonderful town.

I don't think there would be much saved. We have a unified school district and police, fire and public works coordinate to varying degrees.

There's a lot to think about with saving money by combining municipalities. Like how much would you really save? Do you reduce the size of the police and fire departments and put people out of work? What about the public works employees, or the municipal office employees?

If you figure out how to do it, you might be able to convert some existing township facilities on either side of the border into ratables. For instance shut down the Maplewood public works facility and rebuild it with housing or commercial real estate. But I'm not convinced that's going to make much financial difference.

Ultimately the savings would come from reducing the combined payroll and eliminating redundant physical assets like the aforementioned public works facility. Is anyone willing to tackle that?

A merger definitely won't save anything to do with the schools since it is a single district with one high school and has been all along. As long as we have the current system of funding education in New Jersey, districts like ours (older buildings, fewer ratables, etc.) are going to be paying obscene taxes. Relative to average income, our taxes are among the worst in the state.

BubbaTerp said:

All the more reason to formally unite the towns and cut back on duplicate spending. South Mountain, NJ would be a wonderful town.

The people who think waste can be eliminated from the budget are the same people who have not examined the budget.

The savings could be there if we think more globally, a single township of Essex for example if properly run, could result in expanded services for reduced cost. What would mitigate against such an approach is he loss of the home rule that NJ residents have come to cherish. Then there is the problem of being a the top of the list of the most heavily taxed municipalities. Our tax relief gain from a desirable merger would be someone else's loss. Not going to happen any time soon. This is why he emphasis has shifted from consolidation to shared services.

We have already given up home rule by having a state mandated 2% cap on tax increases. What if our two towns were willing to increase our burden to maintain excellent schools? We are basically denied that choice by the state.

The end product you envision is admirable but the reality of the situation is that we would resolve one problem at the expense of creating a far more serious problem with an impact that could negatively affect all of us.. If our tax burden were increased to the degree required to support the school system you envision, there would be a major exodus of those who can barely afford the taxes we presently have. This would be especially true of our long term resident seniors and newly arrived 1st time home buyers who are stretching their budget now to live here. As taxes rise, it will become increasingly difficult to attract new residents to purchase the homes of those who leave. Loss of residents would further increase the tax burden for thse who choose to stay.

There was a time not so long ago, before the state-imposed caps, when (even without the caps) we saw cuts each year because the BOE was mindful of the serious tax burden in our community. In fact, one of the big concerns around here when the caps first went in was that we had already made significant cuts and would be hurt more by the caps than districts that still had more 'fat' in their budgets and this would just push 'real reform' further out into the future. We certainly have yet to see any meaningful state-wide reform since then.

The long-term solution will require significant change in how the state of NJ funds education as well as, even less likely, a change in the moral character of legislators and governors who "promise" many things and rarely deliver.

New Jersey does not need a single new shopping mall as the overall population is in decline and on-line shopping has surged. Nor does New Jersey need more casinos as they tend to go bankrupt around here.

Why do I mention these two items? The state gives very large tax breaks for these adventures when they are not needed.

Long-term it would be good if education funding was shifted off of property taxes (or at least primarily as we see here in Maplewood and South Orange) and more to a state obligation.

The District budget is in excess of $120 million and yes there are efficiencies that can be made. But these efficiencies, while they must be done, will not make the difference between rolling a surplus and not.

One of the basic problems is that most of the District school buildings are functionally obsolete. They are riddled with asbestos and they were built in a different era, before the tools that we all take for granted -- Internet, wireless, security systems (cameras, alarms, gates), modern heating systems, computer systems for record keeping (PowerSchool, e-mail, etc) and on and on.

Yes, these buildings in many ways are historic structures, but their primary function has not changed -- education. I submit that at some point -- not this year or next -- some of these buildings may have to be replaced in whole or in part. We have consigned over 6000 students to go to school in functionally obsolete buildings, buildings that cannot be used for conducting education in the modern era. If your home were riddled with asbestos and all wiring added had to be hung on the walls (go look at the central core of Columbia HS) you might say that your house is obsolete and needs a gut rehab. Well, that is where we are at Columbia and other schools.

At some point we will have the issue forced on what to do with the swimming pool now that it is confirmed to be a danger if used as a pool. Since the pool is completely surrounded with structures -- A and C wings surround it, i.e., the pool is in the interior of the building -- we cannot bring cranes in for any kind of construction purposes. Either all work gets done by simply walking in through small door ways or the roof gets smashed in.

Given the cost for restoring one part of the old structure, just note that the costs to make Columbia be even close to modern in the central core are huge. The "newer" wings -- B, C and D -- are cinder block-based and at least some of the wiring and piping can be hidden in drop ceilings. But classrooms are fixed in size and significant investment is needed room by room to bring them up to modern education standards. The tech that we use and will be used as time goes on does not respect building structures from 50 to 90 years ago. We still have to teach the kids while work goes on and if we only do work in the summers, then kids born this year may still see the work going on when they arrive at Columbia.

As with all public works -- ALL public works like highways, bridges, streets, mass transit, water and sewerage systems -- maintenance and repair were ignored. These costs were ignored by politicians as these were costs to be funded out of taxes. Politicians talk about keeping taxes down but somehow when things fall apart it is always someone else's fault (previous governor or mayor or a civil service employee -- Christie blaming a civil service employee at NJT when they parked trains in flood zones when there was an individual in charge of NJT who chose to be incompetent.)

It will take years to fix the buildings and this will not be solved easily or cheaply.

A fraternity brother of mine made this comment on Facebook in the context of the launching of USS Zumwalt.

"I used to work in the ER in Bath, Maine. The majority of my patients in this small town worked at Bath Iron Works - the contractor that made this ship. (I saw lots of people with metal fragments in their eyes among other things).

I have mixed feelings about this ship. It's pretty cool looking and is an amazing piece of technology. And Bath Iron Works provided a lot of jobs. But it cost the taxpayer $3.6 Billion for this ship alone.

To those who think we 'can't afford' to give everybody health care (or improve our crumbling infrastructure, or provide free tuition to public colleges, or whatever your favorite project is) this is a stark reminder of what we have decided to spend our money on instead."

http://www.wcsh6.com/news/local/bath-brunswick/navys-zumwalt-leaving-bath-iron-works-this-week/315119540

I'd say sac wins the award for understanding the situation we are in! The caps were put in place when we had already made budget cuts, and districts around us that had not yet done so are watching us as the canary in the coal mine for what they might have to do a few years out when the easier cuts are done.

As long as we are in a labor intensive business, and have budget growth caps that are lower than growth rate of salary and benefits (which exceeds 2% in most businesses as well as in education), the state has put us in a situation that guarantees painful cuts every year.

This leaves open the question of whether the cap was a real effort at tax relief, or another round in the game of destroying public schools and then pointing to privatization (or Christies current immoral funding plan) as the solution.

To Jude's valid points about infrastructure, I believe the current caps do not prevent us from taking on further bonded debt to build and repair. We have been trying to get by on a level amount of bonding to keep our buildings operating. I have no idea if we have the local willingness to bond more heavily (and raise taxes) for bigger capital plans to substantially change our infrastructure. The optics of building wonderful buildings (or pools!) while steadily cutting teaching staff is a hard one to propose, in spite of the way the budget works.

sac said:

There was a time not so long ago, before the state-imposed caps, when (even without the caps) we saw cuts each year because the BOE was mindful of the serious tax burden in our community. In fact, one of the big concerns around here when the caps first went in was that we had already made significant cuts and would be hurt more by the caps than districts that still had more 'fat' in their budgets and this would just push 'real reform' further out into the future. We certainly have yet to see any meaningful state-wide reform since then.

FilmCarp said:

We have already given up home rule by having a state mandated 2% cap on tax increases. What if our two towns were willing to increase our burden to maintain excellent schools? We are basically denied that choice by the state.

Isn't it true that that the district can raise taxes beyond 2% (and beyond any additional allowed increases for healthcare and enrollment costs and beyond any 'banked cap' from the last 3 years), but would need to get Board of School Estimate approval to do so?

So are we absolutely denied by the state, or has the state just made it more politically difficult to raise taxes beyond the "2% cap" due to the required approval of the local townships? (OTOH, I'd agree that the superintendent pay cap clearly denies us home rule)

Sometimes I feel the tax cap is used as an excuse where political will is absent.

Even without having to go to the Board of School Estimate, our district has perfectly legal taxing authority ('banked cap' ) that it has frequently chosen not to fully utilize and which, in some years, it has allowed to expire forever. Raising this additional revenue requires just a simple School Board vote for a budget that includes it.

I'm not at all arguing for higher taxes here folks - there are legitimate arguments on both sides of that, and if we are fighting for anything it should be for state aid reform. But I am pointing out that the cap isn't nearly as absolute as some people make it sound, and I am pointing out that our district has stayed below legally allowed increases just about every year in the recent past, for good or for bad. That has been the choice of our district administrators, our Board of Ed and our voters, not the state.

^This.

The Board made the choice to level all teacher cuts at Columbia. A big number absorbed by what should be the flagship of the district.