The Hoboken Board of Education approved a $67.62 million budget for the 2015-2016 school year this past Tuesday, a 1.3 percent increase over its 2014-15 budget. With state aid still stagnant and payments to the city’s three charter schools continuing to rise, school administrators described the new fiscal plan as a “maintenance budget” with little in the way of new programs, funded by a 4 percent increase in the school tax levy.
Of the total budget, $53.47 million covers Hoboken Public Schools’ general operating fund. When unanticipated state aid cuts and charter payment increases from this past year are accounted for, the 2015-16 operating budget represents an increase of $1.23 million or 2.36 percent over the current school year.
The remaining $14.5 million of the district’s total budget consists of grants and entitlements over which the school board has no control, such the state money that funds Hoboken’s universal preschool program.
The 2015-16 budget passed by a vote of 8 to 1, with Trustee Peter Biancamano the only dissenter.
The vast majority of the operating budget is funded by residents’ taxes.
The property tax levy will increase by a projected 4 percent, or $1.58 million, to $41 million in 2015-16. Based on current projections, the increase equates to as little as $13.04 in taxes per $100,000 in assessed property value. For the average Hoboken residential property valued at $518,000, the increase will mean an estimated $67.53 more per year in property taxes.
No public vote
For the fourth year running, the new school budget will not be voted on directly by Hoboken voters. The school board voted in February 2012 to move its elections from April to November, and part of that change means the budget will only go to a city-wide referendum if the proposed school tax levy increase exceeds 2 percent.
Although that was the case this year, Hoboken was able to exceed 2 percent without triggering a referendum because the board passed tax levies below the two percent cap in recent years. This year it cashed in $695,568 in the “banked cap” space it had accrued.
“We were faced with some pretty big challenges that influenced our planning for the future year.” – William Moffitt
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“Let’s say this 4 percent tax increase would have been on the ballot in November,” said Biancamano. “I would be out there telling people to vote for it because we needed it for the schools. My gripe the past three years has been that [the school board majority] is raising taxes without letting the people decide on what to do with their money.”
Staying in the black
School officials and board trustees have stressed repeatedly that their hands were tied when it came to balancing their annual budgets without raising taxes or cutting staff. “We were faced with some pretty big challenges that influenced our planning for the future year,” said district business administrator William Moffitt.
During this past school year, the Hoboken school district learned that its state school choice aid would be almost $670,000 lower than expected, while the payments it owed to charter schools would be $216,000 higher than expected.
The school choice aid cuts were reversed in this year’s state education budget, with a net increase of almost $80,000 going to Hoboken, but the district saw no relief in the charter school costs.
With the Hoboken Dual Language Charter School (HoLa) adding a seventh grade and doubling the size of its sixth grade this coming year, its share of the Hoboken school tax levy is expected to increase by $407,938. All told, the district’s payments to charter schools will increase by $524,956.
Since HoLa opened in September 2010, Hoboken Public Schools’ total payments to charters have increased by just over 80 percent, from $5 million to $9 million. (See sidebar.)
That skyrocketing cost is at the core of the school board’s continued legal fight against HoLa’s expansion. In its appeal of a March 2015 New Jersey Department of Education ruling reaffirming HoLa’s expansion, the school board argued that the state’s decision was “arbitrary and capricious because it does not address the funding impact of HoLa’s expansion on the District’s budget in any manner.”
Some Hoboken education observers have criticized the school board’s claims of financial duress while it maintains a $1.1 million surplus in the 2015-16 budget.
“With such a surplus, one must question what negative impact charter funding will have on the Hoboken School District,” wrote University of Texas professor Dr. Anthony Petrosino, the assistant to Hoboken’s schools superintendent from 2007 to 2009 and a current member of the HoLa Board of Trustees, on his blog.
“What book won’t be purchased?” he asked. “What program will not be enacted? What person cannot be hired? Which low income students or special needs students will be deprived of a single educational resource?”
In an oblique response to Petrosino, Moffitt explained on Tuesday that state regulations strongly recommend that school districts maintain a surplus equal to 2 percent of their total budget as a rainy day fund to cover unforeseen events like a leaky roof or the arrival of more out-of-district special education students, who can cost the district upwards of $100,000 each, than originally expected.
“When I’m below 2 percent and [the state of New Jersey] review my budget,” said Moffitt, “they usually ask me why I’m below, and they ask me ‘What is the plan to get back to two’ and they want the rationale behind different numbers.”
The district plans to spend $691,000 of its current surplus in the upcoming year’s budget, leaving the remaining surplus balance at just under two percent of the total budget.
Although the 2015-16 school budget did not contain any significant cuts to existing staff, like the elimination of the district bus drivers that took place last year, Moffitt said the district forewent the addition of two new elementary school teachers, one elementary school specialist, a special education teacher, and a behavioral difficulties teacher that it had originally intended to hire.
—SIDEBAR—
Hoboken school board files new motion to freeze HoLa charter school expansion; would block 7th grade next year
In a legal motion filed last week, the Hoboken Board of Education has sought to temporarily block the addition of a seventh grade class at a local charter school while its larger lawsuit challenging the expansion is heard in appellate court.
If the motion to stay succeeds, the 21 HoLa sixth graders slated to continue on to seventh grade at the Hoboken Dual Language Charter School (HoLa) this fall will be forced to find a new school. With the application deadlines for local charter and private schools long since passed, the district Junior Senior High School would most likely be their only option.
In late March, state Commissioner of Education David Hespe upheld his agency’s 2014 approval of HoLa’s expansion to seventh and eighth grade, closing a four-month review conducted at the behest of the Hoboken school board.
The school board first filed an appeal of the expansion last April, arguing that the move would exacerbate racial and socioeconomic segregation in Hoboken’s traditional public schools. That argument did not ultimately sway Hespe, who ruled in March that HoLa has had no racially segregative effect on the district schools and better reflects Hoboken’s school-age population to boot.
Hoboken interim superintendent Richard Brockel criticized the decision, which he said was based on flawed data and ignored socioeconomic issues and the effect of charter expansion on Hoboken’s school budget. A majority of the school board agreed with him, voting on April 14 to appeal Hespe’s ruling, although it decided to fund the lawsuit through private donations from now on. The official notice of appeal was filed two days later.
The motion to stay HoLa’s expansion was filed before the state Department of Education’s Bureau of Controversies and Disputes on April 27. If it fails there, the school board will file the same motion in state appellate court, according to school board president Ruth Tyroler.
Whether it fails depends on how well the school board is able to demonstrate that it will sustain irreparable injury if the stay is not issued and has a case with a reasonable probability of success in court, among other things. According to HoLa Board of Trustees President Barbara Martinez, such conditions will be hard to prove.
“It is unclear to us why the Hoboken Board of Ed continues to persecute our school,” Martinez wrote in a statement via email. “Not once, but twice the NJ Department of Education has reviewed their claims and declared they have no merit.”
“Our school has been successfully operating for five years,” she continued, “helping students from all backgrounds achieve high academic results – why wouldn’t the Hoboken Board of Education want a high performing public school to grow and flourish for our children?”
Given its stated commitment to seeing out the appeal, the school board argues that stopping HoLa’s seventh graders from matriculating is the best option.
“Not granting a stay would allow students to continue to enroll in grades that might not exist the following year,” wrote school board special counsel Eric Harrison in his motion brief.
If the school board wins its appeal, explained Harrison, the HoLa seventh graders “would be forced to change schools in the middle of an academic year, or to attempt to make last minute plans to enroll in a district or private school after the enrollment periods have ended.”
As of Tuesday, school board president Ruth Tyroler did not know exactly how much had been raised for the appeal, but she said the donations received so far would be disclosed in the agenda packet at the upcoming school board meeting on Tuesday, May 12.
“We know that we are going to be able to self-fund the appeal,” said Tyroler. “We wouldn’t have filed it if we didn’t know we were going to get the money.”
Carlo Davis may be reached at cdavis@hudsonreporter.com.