Sports, Clubs, Kindergarten At Risk In Toms River School Aid Cuts

TOMS RIVER, NJ — On Friday night, hundreds of fans packed the stands at Toms River High School North's Gernerd Field to watch the Mariners' football team play for a spot in the state sectional championships.

Students clad in blue and gold filled the stands, yelling their support to the 80 or so players on the Toms River North football team as they took on Kingsway, urged and led by the Mariners' cheerleaders.

The hundred-member Marching Mariners band showed off the fruits of their hours of practice during the halftime performance, belting out music and marching with precision as their brass and silver instruments sparkled under the lights, the flags of the color guard swinging and swaying in time with the music.

It could be the last football game played at Toms River North by the Mariners, who lost to Kingsway, 19-14, ending their 2019 season. It could be the last because the 2020 football season for the Mariners — as well as football at Toms River East and Toms River South in 2020 — is at risk.

Anticipated cuts of $5.3 million to the 2020-2021 Toms River Regional School District budget, necessitated in large part by an expected $4.3 million cut in state aid, could see to that. Clubs, kindergarten and all sports — including football — may be on the chopping block.

"This stuff keeps me up at night every night," Superintendent David Healy said Thursday, hours after laying out the dire situation the district faces for the Toms River Regional Board of Education. "This is a very emotional process for all of us. There are young lives in the balance."

The district has been making cuts going back to 2009-2010, when the state cut $10 million in aid when then-Gov. Chris Christie slashed funding to all school districts. Those cuts were compounded when Superstorm Sandy devastated the Shore, taking out $2.2 billion in ratables and 10,000 homes in Toms River alone. Seven years later, there are still more than $500 million in ratables that have not returned to the property tax roles. Christie's 2 percent cap on property tax levy increases has handcuffed the district further, forcing it to make cuts even as expenses in vital areas rose.

"We've been taking from other places (in the budget to make ends meet) for years," said William Doering, the district's business administrator. "If you're in a circumstance where you have wiggle room it's one thing. We have no wiggle room left."

"It is unimaginable to me the position that we're in and that we're going to be in if things don't change," he said.

It's why, Healy said, school district officials are continuing to fight the state aid cuts that were put in place in the summer of 2018 under S2, the law that amended part of the 2008 School Funding Reform Act.

They have no choice but to fight, Doering said. Otherwise, "our next five years are going to be cataclysmic."

"Everything's on the table"

Healy and Doering have been warning for nearly two years that devastating cuts were coming, cuts as a result of the push by state Sen. President Stephen Sweeney for the school funding legislation known as S2.

Sweeney unveiled S2, which targets so-called "adjustment aid," during the 2017 state budget process. He used it as a bargaining chip in wrangling with Christie that led to the state government shutdown that became better known for Christie's "Beachgate" photo.

Sweeney said — and continues to say — school districts receiving that aid are overfunded, and their residents are not paying their fair share of property taxes to support their schools. He has made claims that Toms River and other districts are receiving the adjustment aid for students that are no longer in the district.

"Sweeney knows that isn't true," Healy said. "We don't get paid for phantom kids. Our adequacy number and our per-pupil costs are based on current enrollments."

"We tax less because we spend less," Healy said.

The district's per-pupil costs were $17,606 for the 2017-18 school year, according to the state Department of Education, a figure based on the district's actual enrollment of 15,531 and the district's total spending of $273,431,660. The total spending includes debt service.

The state has said Toms River is spending below adequacy — less than the amount the state has determined is necessary to provide a "thorough and efficient education" as defined by the state constitution. Toms River was $4,000 below the state's adequacy number per pupil in 2017-18, which was $21,866. The district is the fourth-lowest in spending among 97 districts with more than 3,500 students.

"If we spent at just the state averages in terms of total cost per pupil, our tax levy would be higher than our local fair share," Healy said. Local fair share is the amount the state says Toms River schools should be taxing the district's residents. "We're being penalized for our own efficiency."

Yet Sweeney and others continue to insist Toms River is a wealthy district. Sweeney even made a claim in 2018 that Toms River students are supplied with iPads, which is not true. The district has Chromebooks, on a five-year rolling lease program, that were obtained to meet state testing requirements. They do not have enough Chromebooks for each student to be assigned one for the entire school year, an issue that regularly draws complaints from parents.

The district has more than 4,400 low-income students — a quarter of its enrollment. It has the highest percentage of foreclosures in the county and in the United States, and leads Ocean County in homelessness.

"We rank eighth in the state in homelessness," Healy said, "and we are ground zero for the opioid crisis. You'd think the state would want to help."

Instead, the district has faced a barrage of cuts. It was $1.4 million in 2017, down from the $3.3 million Sweeney initially proposed. Read more: School Funding Cuts For Toms River Down To $1.4M Under Christie-Sweeney Deal

Then another $2.3 million was cut in 2018, when Sweeney threatened another shutdown to force Gov. Phil Murphy to sign S2 into law, gutting Murphy's proposal to increase state aid across the state in the process. As the district backfilled those last-minute 2018 cuts, Healy and Doering said without changes or a reversal of S2, courtesy busing, sports, and clubs all were at risk of being cut, as was full-day kindergarten. Read more: School Aid Fight: Toms River To Lose $18M Under Sweeney Plan

"We always spoke to the fact that everything's on the table," Healy said. "Going into the next year we have to make very, very difficult choices. It's either going to affect staff or programs."

No quick fixes

There's a common refrain every time school budgets come up, especially when a tax levy increase is in the offing. "Get rid of the administrators. They're all overpaid." "Look for shared services." And in recent months, busing of private school students to Lakewood has been a target.

"There's fat in there. They just have to look harder," is a typical comment, going back years.

On Wednesday night at the school board's committee meetings, board members said those comments simply aren't reality. There's nothing left to cut, they said.

The district had one administrator for every 219 students in 2017-18, one of the highest student-to-administrator ratios in the state. Because the Taxpayer Guide to Education Spending data is from two years ago, it does not reflect the current reality. The district has cut positions, including administrative slots.

At Toms River Intermediate East, one of the largest schools in the district, there are three administrators assigned to oversee more than 1,500 students, plus the building staff. Those administrators not only deal with discipline and staff issues, they must evaluate teachers through in-class observation, fill out reports and manage a plethora of information.

Busing of private school students, the latest hot-button issue, is mandated by a 1967 state law; it requires districts to provide busing for students attending non-public schools within 20 miles of their home, or a payment in lieu of transportation if the cost exceeds the limit set by the state, currently $1,000 per student. The law was upheld in 1971 as constitutional. One newly elected school board candidate, Kevin Kidney, campaigned on halting busing of students to private Lakewood schools, despite what the state law says.

The transportation department has been lauded by the state for operating at twice the level of efficiency that the state sets as a benchmark. The only possible cut to transportation would be providing only what's mandated. State law requires districts to provide transportation for students who live more than 2 miles from their elementary schools, and more than 2.5 miles from secondary schools.

That possibility is a very unpopular option with parents, who have pushed back even at students having to walk a couple of blocks to catch the bus. With a number of state highways crisscrossing the town, and pedestrian access to sidewalks limited, safety concerns are significant.

As for shared services, Doering said the district has numerous agreements already in place. There's a fuel co-op with the township, and the township provides garbage and recycling pickup, school resource officers, and allows the district use of Bey Lea Golf Course and Winding River Ice Rink for sports programs. The district, in exchange, provides busing for the town's summer recreation program, busing to the school-year program and other services.

"That's just a few examples," Doering said. "We have outstanding levels of shared services."

The buildings and grounds staffing is a skeleton crew, Healy said, and there's nothing to cut there. Budget surplus at the end of 2017-18 was just $590,534, and was quickly absorbed in 2018-19's cuts.

The district is self-insured, which has kept health insurance premium increases about 3 percent lower than what the state has seen for its health insurance program, Doering said. The district has stop-loss policies that cap individual claims, and a health clinic for employees to help control costs.

Though it's too soon to calculate the impact on the district's energy costs of the installation of LED lighting throughout the schools in the last year, Doering said a number of energy education initiatives have saved the district $6 million in utility costs over the last six years.

"The efforts really have been in place to keep costs down," Doering said.

"People think 'Oh, we've been through this before, the schools always seem to figure out a way out,' but this time there is no solution in sight," Healy said. "We are at a point where we have focus first on what's mandated."

Focusing on mandates

What's legally mandated under the state constitution is a thorough and efficient education for children ages 5 to 19.

"We have to feed you, we have to keep you safe and we have to educate you," Healy said. That starts with the classroom.

"Our No. 1 priority is to protect the instructional environments," he said, both through safety measures and through maintaining reasonable class sizes with teaching and support staff.

That's why co-curricular activities — sports at all levels, clubs, the drama club's plays, the marching bands, all of the pieces of a school that give it life and provide opportunities for students to explore possibilities for their futures — are on the table. None are mandatory.

The sports and clubs and activities are $3.8 million in the district's budget. That figure does not account for the thousands of dollars raised to support the various programs by parents and students. There are roughly 13,000 participants in clubs, sports and activities in the district, and those programs not only serve as a glimpse at future possibilities, they are a way to keep kids who are at-risk in school and out of trouble.

"The research is very clear that after school hours tend to be the most generative time for juvenile delinquency and problem behaviors," Ocean County Prosecutor Bradley D. Billhimer wrote in a May letter addressed to Murphy, Sweeney and other state legislators. "In fact, during the school week, studies show that juvenile crime peaks between the hours of 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. The importance of after-school extracurricular activities and athletic programs cannot be understated."

"They are critically important to student development," Healy said.

Pay-to-play, where fees are charged for students to participate in activities, isn't a workable solution. "Even if we set it at $100 per student, that's only $1.3 million," he said, and it would be cost-prohibitive for lower-income families.

It's not just the activities and sports that could go. Full-day kindergarten, the program the district established five years ago and that has been very successful, is on the block as well. It accounts for $3.9 million of the budget. While kindergarten has a huge role in helping students begin their school years on a solid footing, it's not a mandatory program. The district could return to half-day kindergarten, but that would be a temporary solution because of the cuts still to come under S2. Those cuts continue until 2025.

"It's a painful exercise to essentially see all that we've built dismantled," Healy said. "It's just not OK."

Added in the mix is ongoing teachers contract negotiations. The current deal expires June 30, 2020, and average raises for teachers around the state have been 3 percent in recent months. Salaries and benefits for teaching staff account for about $150 million in the budget.

"Some people will say they should take a pay freeze. Why should they have to accept that?" Healy said. "Our teachers deserve to be fairly compensated. They go above and beyond to support our children."

Even as class sizes have risen — the district cut 77 staff positions for the 2019-2020 school year, with the majority due to retirements and resignations, and class sizes are approaching 30 students in third grade and older — the teaching staff has worked hard to adjust, he said.

"Our kids are getting an amazing education and that's because of the staff in our district. Our staff rises to the occasion, and our teachers are arguably the most child-centered I've ever encountered," Healy said.

That's why Healy and Doering and the school board continue to fight the S2 cuts.

"I am tenacious," Healy said. "I am not willing to give up."

For Doering, it's as personal as it gets. "I have a daughter and a nephew in the district. My daughter is the prop master for the musical. I can't imagine that being gone next year."

Fighting the state

The fight against S2 continues to take multiple forms. The district remains part of a lawsuit against the state education department over the department's school funding formula.

The department has refused to release the formula it uses to determine the distribution of $6.5 billion in equalization aid, which amounts to 17 percent of the state budget. The state calls the formula "proprietary" and has rejected multiple Open Public Records Act requests for it

"If I refused to tell taxpayers how I was spending 17 percent of our (school) budget, they'd have my head, and rightly so," Healy has said.

In remarks before the state Senate budget committee in the spring, Healy said, "the lack of transparency is deeply unsettling, especially since the property rate, or multiplier, in the formula rose 49.2 percent from 2008-09 to 2018-19 while the income rate only increased 1.6 percent. Something is clearly not making sense." The property rate is used to calculate how much Toms River and its sending towns allegedly can afford to pay in property taxes to support the school budget.

The district has applied for $4.4 million in emergency aid from the state for 2019-2020, but has not received a response as of yet. "Last year we heard back by October," Healy said.

District officials continue to press their case with state legislators through meetings and leading a variety of efforts. Students and staff and some residents packed 27 buses in March. They sent hundreds of emails. In May, they delivered more than 30,000 letters — none of which received an acknowledgement from state legislators.

State Sen. James Holzapfel and Assemblymen Dave Wolfe and Greg McGuckin have pushed and prodded, but they have been the only visible support from legislators at any level, beyond those who bused to Trenton.

The lawsuit, by eight districts, initially has been rejected but is now moving to the appellate courts.

"This fight is an ongoing daily effort," Healy said. "Nothing has stopped. There's too much at stake."

Healy is hopeful, however. "I always have hope. You have to," he said.

And he believes the community will rally, as long as they really understand what is at stake.

"I liken it to a boat sinking," Doering said. "People don't react until there's water coming under the door. The water is coming under the door now."

Doering said he wished Sweeney, Murphy and Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin would take the district up on its invitation to come visit.

"I really wish they would come and spend a day in our district. We can show them what Toms River is and what we really have. They can have their eyes opened ... if they really want to look," Doering said.

"This is a child-centered community that has not deviated from that, and it has everything to do with the people," Healy said. "These are decisions we don't want to make and should not have to make."

It angers him that the district is being put in the position that Friday's football game could be the last high school game played on the Mariners' field. Sports — from soccer to basketball, ice hockey to tennis, golf to wrestling and of course, baseball and football — are part of the fabric of the community.

"Where would these kids be on a Friday night if not for football?" Healy said. "This isn't good for kids, and it's not good for the community."

"If anyone thinks this is not emotional for people and we're not human in this process, they're wrong."

"We're not letting the district go down without a fight," Doering said.

They just hope the community will understand the reality and join them.

This article has been updated to clarify that cuts are being considered for the 2020-2021 school year, and updated with the score of the football game on Friday night.

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