Show Us What You Value

Budgets demonstrate priorities. President Joe Biden once said, “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.”

My name is Jennifer Paulino, president of the Robbinsville Education Association. The REA proudly represents over 350 teachers, secretaries, paraprofessionals, custodians, transportation, and other certificated staff positions in our district schools.

Last month, the REA expressed our concerns about the ongoing discussion to privatize our district’s paraprofessionals. We want to take a minute to applaud the Board of Education for its decision to disregard its plan to privatize our paraprofessionals. This is the right decision for our staff, our community, and what we value above all else, our students’ education and well-being.
But we also want the community to know that the Board can still reverse this decision. Since the Board officially notified the REA of its intention to outsource IAs, they have until May to seek and accept bids. The IAs can still be outsourced.

The Board, Superintendent Brian Betze, and Business Administrator Nick Mackres have stated a budgetary crisis led them to consider privatizing the Instructional Assistant staff. After careful analysis of the District’s audit, we have seen no evidence that there is a budgetary crisis. In fact, our analysis revealed that Robbinsville School District has plenty of money.
Here is just a snapshot:

• In 20-21, the Robbinsville School District brought in more than $260,000 in miscellaneous revenues than they budgeted for—which has been the consistent pattern for the last three years, and we have no reason to believe it will not happen again in the 2021-22 school year.
• The Robbinsville School District brought in an additional $443,000 in extraordinary aid.
• The Robbinsville School District brought in an additional $724,000 in grants and entitlements than they anticipated.
• The Robbinsville School District has $2.9 million more in surplus than they budgeted for.

Finally, when you compare the district’s actual revenues versus its actual expenditures for 2020-2021—the Robbinsville School District brought in $822,000 more than they spent during the fiscal year. That’s excluding the state aid and Federal COVID relief funds the District has and is poised to receive.

Any strains on the school budget, are from this Board perennially failing to meet adequacy. Adequacy is the state-determined level of funding it deems necessary in order to deliver an adequate education to every student in the district. According to the state, the town of Robbinsville has not directed enough of the tax dollars to its educational system for the past eight years. The maximum amount of tax levy the school board can increase is 2% plus any waivers or banked tax levy caps from the prior 3 years. The board can also request more if necessary by taking it to the public for a vote. This means that the Board has deliberately underfunded the school district and short-changed the education of our children.

Cap banking happens when the school district or local government doesn't increase the tax levy by the full two percent allowable by law. The difference between the maximum two percent and the actual levy increase is 'banked', available for use in future budgets for the next 3 years.
Rather than making the choice to value staff—and the services they provide Robbinsville’s students—the Board and District administration are pretending there is a budget shortfall and willfully disregarding an available funding stream: banked cap.

Our Board is choosing to let their banked cap expire. Over the past eight years, they let go of $859,000! If the pattern continues, they are poised to bank another $1.6 million into the 2022-23 school budget, we just hope they won’t let that expire, too.

Distorting the truth about the budget and failing to go to cap, means that this Board chooses to make up the difference by monkeying with the programs and services that we provide to our schools’ population. They ignore sidebar agreements and withhold stipends, understaff their schools, allow needed repairs to worsen for years before addressing them, and look to privatize segments of staffing.

This is not conjecture or a difference of opinion between labor and management.

This is clear arithmetic, backed by evidence.

On behalf of the 350 members of the Robbinsville Education Association, especially the 47 paraprofessionals whose careers are on the line—I am again urging this Board to make a choice:

Choose to let the numbers speak for themselves.
Choose to invest in our dedicated, essential support professionals.
Choose to better, not erode, the quality of the Robbinsville school district.
Choose to favor decisions supporting the best interests of our students, our programs, and our community, and show us what you value!