School Aid Increase Won't Be Applied Until Next Budget Cycle, Says Administrator

The Barnegat Board of Education will wait and apply hundreds of thousands in extra state aid to the 2012-13 school budget, said Board Administrator Dean Allison.

The state announced last Tuesday that districts around New Jersey would receive a significantly bigger increase in state aid this school year than originally promised back in February.

In Barnegat’s case, the boost means the district will receive $19.7 million from the state – $935,067 more than it did last school year.

The increase came as a big surprise, Allison said. While talk of a boost in aid to non-Abbott districts had been tossed around this spring, he said he didn’t expect Barnegat would get a piece of the rumored pie.

When he got the letter from the county Department of Education Tuesday announcing the bump in aid, “you could have knocked me off my chair with a feather,” he said.

The Department of Education strongly encouraged districts use the extra funds for property tax relief, though Allison said it laid out several options.

Districts could use the unexpected windfall to bring down the 2011-12 tax levy and offer tax relief to residents; they could appropriate the funds and revise the 2011-12 budget to include increased spending; they could wait until the following year to appropriate the aid; or they could approve a combination of these.

(To see the options laid out for districts by the state, click the PDF included in this story.)

The Barnegat Board of Education does hope to use the funds to keep taxes down, said Allison, but the time window allotted by the state for districts to adjust their 2011-12 numbers was too small to allow tax relief this year, he said.

The district learned Thursday that in order to change the tax levy, the board would have to call a special meeting – with the standard 48 hours’ notice – and pass a resolution doing so, Allison said. Revised budgets would then have to be distributed to local, county and state officials by 4 p.m. tomorrow.

With several board members away on vacation when the aid announcement came, there wasn’t time to make changes for the current school year, said Allison.

As a result, he said, his recommendation was to wait and apply the extra aid to the 2012-13 budget. The board would likely use at least a portion of it to again keep the tax levy flat and possibly reduce it, he said.

The district will face financial hurdles next year, Allison said. Teacher union contracts expire, and though salary increases likely will be smaller than in the past, “I do not expect them to be zero,” he said.

In addition, federal funding supporting teacher jobs that has helped Barnegat retain educators won’t be available next year.

As a result, he said, “I can’t promise that the $467,000 would be entirely used for tax relief, but knowing this board, they’re going to try to give some of it back.”