State Aid Cut: What Does South Brunswick School District Stand To Lose?

SOUTH BRUNSWICK, NJ — The Board of Education meeting on March 9 was one of the most anticipated in recent times.

Ahead of the meeting, Superintendent Scott Feder sent an invitation to the community to attend, as the agenda was to discuss the impacts of budget cuts on the school district.

South Brunswick stands to lose $4,063,240 in aid during the 2023-24 school year after Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration proposed its fiscal year 2024 budget. More: South Brunswick Schools To Lose $4M In State Aid In 2023-24

The district anticipated the loss of $1.2 million this year, and in anticipation, created a community-wide budget committee to help navigate the cut. More: South Brunswick Schools To Form Committee To Help Navigate Budget Cuts

But with Murphy’s new announcement, the district finds itself in a tough spot as it has just a week to adopt a tentative budget.

Feder presented the problems and solutions they hope to put in place to help the school district. Patch will publish a two-part story, the first dealing with potential problems the district could face due to cuts, and the second dealing with the solutions the district hopes to put forth.

(This is not a comprehensive report, but highlights from the meeting)

What Does South Brunswick Schools Stand To Lose?

Feder said the school district works on a “deficit modeling budgeting” for the past four years. What that essentially means is the school district operates on an “always cut” model, with never enough money to roll on to the next year.

That’s due to the 2 percent cap on the tax levy. That compounded by the S2 funding formula led to a significant loss in state aid and no way to recover it.

With another year left in the S2 funding cuts, the district has already lost over $9 million since 2019. Coupled with equalization aid, the district could well be looking at a possible $6 million cut next year, Feder said.

“We're basically being asked to run a $160 million organization with unknown information. There’s no way to predict at this point, except to say we should predict losing six more million dollars next year,” Feder said.

Student enrollment has been declining for the past seven years and just last year itself, enrolment was down by 2 percent, according to Feder’s presentation.

South Brunswick School District’s operating budget is currently at $146,438,758. However, the same amount will not be sufficient to run the district with similar programs next year, Feder said.

“Salaries go up, cost of energy goes up, cost of gas goes up and whenever the costs to operate a world of a business this size, it goes up,” Feder said.

“A balanced budget would require me to find $5.2 million in the budget.”

Faced with the deficit, the district would have to optimize, cut/reduce expenditure and work towards creating more revenue.

When faced with program cuts, the district will avoid cutting funds from mental and physical health programs; building safety and security; student academic support and student behavior management support.

The areas the district could apply reductions are administrative staff, certified staff, non-certified staff, courtesy busing, district sports, bands and music programing, professional development and extracurricular clubs.

These reductions when applied can lead to the following scenarios:

• Increased class size
• Less support for behavior, HIB and family communication
• Limited extracurricular programming
• Significantly reduced music programming
• Students who live within 2 miles will have to walk to school
• Large certificate staff reduction will result in loss of programs
• Loss of non-certificate staff would directly affect support provided to students and families

"Wait till it becomes reality. And your property value will decline in this town," Feder said. "Everybody else has got millions and millions of dollars. They can do amazing things. I just want a piece of that $25 million or piece of the seven or six million that everybody around us got."

South Brunswick is among 157 New Jersey school districts to see cuts in state aid. Among the Middlesex County school districts covered by this reporter, Edison got the 4th highest increase in aid across the state. The school district saw an increase of 54.44 percent or $ 25,912,537 in aid for 2023-24. Comparatively, Metuchen saw an increase of 15.59 percent or $388,529. Meanwhile, East Brunswick will get a $6,506,024 raise in state aid.

You can watch the full board meeting here.