Cherry Hill School Budget Vote Postponed to March 5

Late changes to make up for an additional six-figure shortfall and concerns over state budget reporting led Cherry Hill school officials to pull the planned 2013-2014 budget vote from Tuesday night’s school board meeting and delay the adoption an additional week.

The bad news was updated prescription drug coverage information bumped that portion of the budget up by roughly $423,000—on top of —the good news is the district can count on more federal funding than originally anticipated, said Jim Devereaux, the district’s assistant superintendent for business.

With budget cuts at the federal level thanks to a sequester that will go into effect March 1, Cherry Hill originally planned on only getting 75 percent of last year’s Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) funding, Devereaux said.

Instead, that funding’s likely to be closer to 85 percent of last year’s, a swing of more than $200,000.

“We caught a break on IDEA,” Devereaux said.

While that money will help close the new gap, the district still had to figure out where to find the rest to balance the books. That’s being accomplished with a  $100,000 reduction in the district’s pension payment, as well as a $93,000 cut to the facilities budget next year.

Still up in the air is state aid, which won’t be released until Thursday, though Gov. Chris Christie indicated there won’t be any cuts to state aid to any district in his budget address Tuesday.

There is the possibility Cherry Hill’s state aid could increase, with the governor adding $97 million to school aid—but that $97 million will be split across 378 districts across the state.

While any increase is welcome, Devereaux said, it likely won’t close the gap the governor created three years ago, when he pulled back millions in aid from the district.

“It’d be great, it’d really help us out,” Devereaux said, “but it’s not $1.8 million.”

The budget concerns go beyond dollars and sense, as well, Devereaux said.

Changes to the software the state uses for budget reporting set off alarms at the local level, Devereaux said, because of how the software muddles free balances and excess fund balances.

“It’s always been somewhat of an arcane thing, but this year there were a few changes this year that made us nervous,” he said, citing the 2010 budget, where the governor denied the district $3.9 million in excess fund balance. “We didn’t want to do anything with the budget as long as all fund balance was being referred to as excess fund balance.”

An email late in the day Tuesday from the state may have resolved those issues, Devereaux said, but it wasn’t enough to make administrators comfortable with putting the budget up for adoption as planned.

“We still do need a little time to make sure it’s crystal clear…before we sign on the dotted line,” he said.

The preliminary budget adoption vote is now set for Tuesday, March 5, at 7 p.m. at the Malberg administration building.