Brick Board To Reconsider Tentative School Budget Monday

BRICK, NJ -- For the second year in a row, the Brick Township Board of Education is having to hold a special meeting to approve a tentative school budget so it can be sent to the Ocean County superintendent for review.

The school board on Thursday night rejected the $154 million tentative budget for 2016-17 proposed by Interim Superintendent Thomas Gialanella. It is about $7 million more than the $147 million budget approved for this school year, and includes a roughly $105 million tax levy -- $5 million more than the 2015-16 tax levy of $100,000,721, which equals a 4.9 percent increase.

On Friday morning, Gialanella, who emphasized that the budget is tentative, said there are both facilities issues and curriculum deficiencies that must be addressed.

"The parking lots and curbing at the schools are falling apart. The gym floors in both gyms at Brick High School need attention," Gialanella said. There are facilities issues throughout the district -- far more than can be addressed in a single budget, he said.

While the district has been doing capital projects -- including the work at Brick Township High School last summer to install air conditioning for the first time -- no money has been put into the capital budget for future projects, he said, when they should have been putting some in a little at a time.

But it's not just facilities that are in need of attention.

"There's no money in some of the textbook accounts," Gialanella said, and there are other curriculum deficiencies.

Two years of flat budgets have hurt the district, he said, but acknowledged the facilities issues go back much further, to decades of school budgets that were rejected by voters -- rejections that often led to even larger tax increases down the road.

In the early 1990s, Brick schools were in need of signifcant repairs and expansion as the township's school enrollment skyrocketed. But voters repeatedly turned down tax levies and cap waivers.

In 1992, those actions led to the state Department of Education restoring both a $1.8 million cap waiver and $1 million the Township Council cut from the $39.6 million tax levy on the district's then $70.7 million budget -- a figure that then-Ocean County Superintendent Joseph Zach said was necessary for the district to provide a thorough and efficient education to its students.

The impact of the restoration was a 12-cent increase in the tax rate, according to reports in the Asbury Park Press at the time.

The following year, the district was forced to raise taxes by double digits again as it tried to figure out how it would accommodate its burgeoning student population -- and voters approved that levy, the first one approved in six years. That budget started out with a 30-cent tax increase, as the district to address its facilities issues on buildings that were 25 to 30 years old.

But in more recent years, Brick's school boards have pulled the purse strings tight -- a response to taxpayer pressure that has left many issues unaddressed. Last year, the tentative budget that was rejected included a 0.9 percent tax increase in addition to one of 0.9 percent for debt service. But the board sent Uszenski and business administrator back to the drawing board with orders to cut the portion of the tax increase that was tied to the general fund.

Gialanella said that while it's early in the budget process and numbers are not finalized, the deficiencies cannot be ignored any longer.

"This is new money the board has to come up with," Gialanella said.

The meeting will be held at 6 p.m. Monday in the technology office at the Board of Education building, 101 Hendricksen Ave.