School Officials Will Assess 2012-13 Budgeting Before Using Additional Aid

Manchester school administrators have decided not to take immediate action on $450,000 in additional aid awarded by the state last week, instead opting to see how the district's finances look in the coming year before making any decisions on how to use the funding.

Superintendent of Schools David Trethaway said at the Manchester Board of Education meeting Wednesday night that he and the administration did not want to rush the creation of a plan to utilize the extra funds.

The school system will receive a total of $5,248,309 in state aid for the 2011-12 school year after the amount of additional aid over 2010-11 was doubled last week from $453,145 to $906,290.

"The bottom line is, let's take a look at what the situation is going to be," Trethaway said. "We didn't want to rush into a decision where we had to do it over night and rush an emergency board meeting to get that through."

The superintendent said that administrators will "let the dust settle and see where our needs are. Certainly we can use it for different areas or as tax relief for the following year," Trethaway said. "We have those options, rather than making a decision in two days about how to spend $450,000."

Business Administrator Craig Lorentzen said that the additional funds will be added to the budget as a surplus and appropriated for school use or put toward property tax relief at a later time. How the money is spent depends on what administrators face when they begin budgeting for the 2012-13 school year in November, he said. The additional aid can be used to lower taxes, or appropriated for the 2012-13 or 2013-14 school year, according to Lorentzen.

Though Trethaway said that directions from N.J. Department of Education Acting Commissioner Chris Cerf were "strongly encouraging" that the funds be distributed as a property tax rebate this year, the superintendent said that the district would have had too few days to weigh the options and still have enough time to advertise for a public meeting. The deadline for deciding how to appropriate the aid was July 19; the announcement from Gov. Chris Christie came on July 12.

"The board now has some time to make considerations," Trethaway said. "I think that was the smart thing to do — take some time to gather information before they do something quickly."

Lorentzen said that the additional aid is "encouraging," especially given that Manchester schools receive about 10 percent of funding from the state, compared to anywhere from 20 to 40 percent in other New Jersey districts. Manchester's large senior population skews the aid formula, according to Lorentzen, a problem that he said only Manchester and two other districts in the state face.  Lorentzen, as well as members of the town council, have talked about making their case to the governor for a change in the funding formula. 

"We're trying to get something together so we can explain our situation," he said. "Especially in these times. The taxpayers are responsible for 88 percent of the budget. The funding formula is flawed."

Residents rejected the 2011-12 school budget during an April vote, leading the town council to approve $135,000 in cuts.