OPINION: Brick School Board Being Penny Foolish Once Again

BRICK, NJ — Brick residents, break out your piggybanks. Dig the loose change out of your couches and empty the pennies out of the center console in your car.

The Brick Township Board of Education needs them.

Clearly that's the only explanation for the latest misguided penny-pinching decision made by the board and voted on at Thursday's school board meeting, where the board approved the rejection of bids for ice time rental for the Brick Township and Brick Memorial high schools' ice hockey teams.

The district budgeted $52,500 for the rentals in the 2016-17 school budget. I checked. The figures are way at the end, on pages 684 and 685 of the detailed budget, after salaries, health care, and dozens of dizzying figures, but they are there: $26,250 budgeted for this year to rent ice time for practice and games for Brick Township High School, and another $26,250 for Brick Memorial's ice hockey team.

That's $52,500 for those playing along at home.

According to sources, the school district rejected the bid from the Ocean Ice Palace on Chambersbridge Road because the Howell Ice Arena has offered a lower price, and the board wants the Ocean Ice Palace to offer the district a discount.

What a bucket of nonsense.

This isn't about fighting for tradition. This is about board members being stupid. There is no sugar-coating this. It's simply stupidity. Perhaps politics too, but I would give the nod to stupidity.

How much does $52,500 impact each Brick taxpayer? A dollar, maybe $2? In the tax rate, it's so small it doesn't register as even a penny.

If the parents of every student in Brick (there are 9,000 students in the district) brought $5 in change to the next Board of Education meeting (it's Nov. 17 at 7 p.m. in the auditorium at Brick High School) it would cover the ice time and then some. If the parents of every high school student in Brick brought $5 in loose change to the board meeting, it would surely cover whatever discount the board is seeking from the Ocean Ice Palace.

Let's look at numbers.

To bus the hockey teams from Brick and Brick Memorial to Howell Ice Arena, which sources have said has offered a lower price, would result in an additional 95 miles per week for the district's buses, which would have to drive hockey players to and from Brick Township and Brick Memorial high schools for practices and games. Ocean Ice Palace is 1.6 miles round-trip from Brick Township High School, and 8.8 miles round-trip from Brick Memorial. Howell Ice Arena is 19.4 miles round-trip from Brick Township High School and 12 miles round-trip from Brick Memorial.

At five trips per week through the ice hockey season, which opens Nov. 7, that's an extra 7,162.5 miles. School buses get roughly 7 mpg, according to the American School Bus Council. So that's an additional 1,023 gallons of fuel that will be consumed. Gasoline prices are about to go up with the 23-cent gasoline tax, so if you figure $2.22 per gallon (based on a price of $1.99 per gallon right now), that's an additional $2,271.06 the district would spend on fuel alone.

Sending the teams to Howell Ice Arena also adds a minimum of 40 minutes to the day for Brick Township High School students, because the trip is 20 minutes one way without traffic. At the time students are typically going to and from practice, the roads are busy with evening commuters, so that 20 minutes is likely closer to 30.

Beyond that, you have to ask why the school board is considering taking $52,500 out of the pockets of a family-owned business right in Brick Township. Ocean Ice Palace is family-owned, just as it has been for decades. The town spends time at every Township Council meeting exhorting residents to "Buy in Brick," urging them to patronize the small businesses that make up the backbone of the community, and then the school board wants to send taxpayer money out of town to save a few pennies? Because unless Howell Ice Arena is offering the ice time at some insanely low unsustainable price, the short-term savings would amount to very little.

This comes down to more of the same stupid attitude that has put the students in Brick Township last for decades. When I was attending Brick Township High School, way back in the early 1980s, school officials bragged about Brick having the cheapest per-pupil costs around. I remember that because I remember how it infuriated my mother that people saw it as acceptable to not spend money on education, as school budget after school budget failed at the polls.

That attitude prevails today, and there's a message that it sends to the students: You're not worthy.

I spoke with a couple of students recently at an event, and one young woman, a senior at Brick High School, said that is the message they receive when they hear arguments over spending money on their education. The kids aren't asking for gold-plated water fountains and school lunches of prime rib. They are asking for schools that don't heat up to 85 degrees on an early summer day, and facilities that don't look like they're stuck in the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1992, the state Department of Education ordered the district to put $3 million back in the budget, because the town council had cut the budget so deeply that basic maintenance was being shortchanged. It was 33-cent tax increase — a big hit for someone like me, who was a first-time homeowner. But I was glad to see it because I knew that even back then, the schools were falling into disrepair.

But clearly the school boards in this town have never learned that lesson. They kept putting off basic maintenance and ignoring problems with the belief that if they never raised taxes, everything would be fine. Instead, the district has had facilities fall into such disrepair that repairing and replacing them has become an emergency. And emergencies are expensive, as the district has seen with the electrical overhaul at Brick Township High School and with the East Gym renovation, which had to be trimmed down from the original plans.

You want something to cut? How about not spending another $15,000 on revising the district's policy manual. That's the amount spent in 2015 on the lengthy revisions that were the subject of hours upon hours of arguments and debate at board meetings last year.

In looking at the policies on the district's website, almost all of them have been updated in the last 18 months. So why does the current board feel it's necessary to do them again? Is it just to put money in the pockets of a company it likes, just as it has done with the professionals the board hired this year? The policies should not need another complete overhaul, they should be at the stage of needing maintenance; yet at Thursday's board meeting the report was they're waiting for the New Jersey School Boards Association to give them a new boilerplate for policies.

What a waste of taxpayer dollars. But hey, let's try to nickel-and-dime a local family-owned business over ice time rentals, no problem.

School board members want the public to think they are paying attention to the impact on taxpayers. I get that. But the endless pissing matches over ice rentals and hiring teachers at $60,ooo instead of $50,000 are just more of the same garbage that has shortchanged Brick's students for decades. Bragging that you've got the cheapest per-pupil cost, while that sounds appealing to the taxpayers, tells the kids they really don't matter.

There are ways to cut costs. Trying to cheap out on ice time to save what would amount to just a few thousand dollars is simply stupid, especially when you've already budgeted for it.

So parents, I urge you: Bring your loose change to the next Board of Education meeting. Let them know it is time to stop being penny-wise and pound foolish when it comes to the students of Brick Township.

Pennies by Karen Wall (Patch Staff)