Dear Burlington Township Families,
I want to invite everyone to join the Board of Education and the administration at the next budget meeting on March 15, 2018. Developing a balanced budget that meets the educational needs of our students is not an easy task; however, it is a vital one. State aid should be released by the time of the meeting. This is a critical component and the work cannot begin in full until that time.
Budget meetings are not exciting. In fact, they are often long and laborious. In Burlington Township, budget meetings are conducted in public. The documents the Board is provided are included on the district website for the whole community to review. Before engaging in discussions, the Board Members must spend considerable time learning the fiscal rules by which the district must abide. The Board can only work as a whole in public. Individual Board Members are not permitted by the Code of Ethics to respond to individual questions or comments. Do not mistake this as being uninformed or uninterested. It is quite the opposite, it takes very strong and committed individuals to gather so much information and refrain from discussion until
a
publicly advertised date and time.
Prior to serving as superintendent, I served as the district's chief financial manager for a decade. I have had the privilege of working with over 20 individuals who served our community as Board of Education Members. These volunteers take time to learn about the district's offerings, needs, and desires while balancing the various mandates, requirements, and standards that apply to New Jersey School Districts. Each member brings unique expertise, talent, and interests. They also take the time to learn about the educational needs and fiscal constraints of the district. They make difficult decisions, often spending hours deliberating just to ensure they explore all possibilities, before adopting a budget. One thing no individual board member or central office administrator has ever done is be untruthful to the public. In fact, there is likely
no district in New Jersey that conducts as open a budgeting process as Burlington Township.
Unfortunately, there is a single-minded view of information being shared with some members of the community. There is no desire from the Board to deny our students an array of experiences. The reality is that the district's long history of being underfunded by the state has a tangible effect on our kids.
The
Board
strives to provide our students many types of curricular, co-curricular and extracurricular experiences. Our community has remained committed to educating our students and allocating funding to support All Students Achieving in and out of the classroom.
The Board commissioned a group of interested volunteers consisting of parents, coaches, recreation department and school employees to study the potential for middle school sports during the development of the 2016-2017 budget. The group worked for several months gathering information, developing potential budgets based on information such as estimates from insurance carriers, contracts and fees. Based on this work, it became clear that it was not fiscally possible to fund the program while maintaining the items already included in the district budget. The committee requested that the Board increase sports related clubs to the after school offerings at the middle school as a means to provide more athletic related experiences. The Board accepted this recommendation and were able to allocate the limited funds necessary.
It is true that we do not have middle school sports or certain high school sports.
This is a function of 20 years of underfunding by the State.
As our district grew in the late 1990's from 1,000 students to a high of 4,400 students in 2007, our state aid remained frozen. That means all the growth, the costs associated with this growth, and the cost of additional mandates were transferred to the local taxpayer. For a brief time, there was hope our district would receive much needed state aid when the new formula was developed which acknowledged we were highly efficient and severely underfunded.
Shortly after, the formula was abandoned, and our funding remained stagnant.
In 2010, the State reduced funding, which resulted in massive reductions in staffing and programs.
We could no longer maintain reduced class sizes the Board had worked hard to achieve. We lost our Pre-Kindergarten program, coaching positions at the High School, all clubs at Fountain Woods School, and most clubs at the middle and high schools. Positions not lost were outsourced during this time.
The Board and administration have remained committed to several driving principles during these tumultuous times. The Board sets budget goals at the beginning of each budget cycle as a means to help guide the conversations and decisions. As a district committed to our children's education, we relentlessly pursue safety, security, mobile technology to enhance 21st century learning, and ensure we comply with new mandates. Over the last few budget cycles the Board of Education has:
-
adopted new science standards.
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supported struggling learners.
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enhanced learning by providing classroom sets of mobile devices in the high school, middle school social studies and mathematics classes, and shared sets throughout the remainder of the district.
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increased our support for the social and emotional need of our students.
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invested in adaptive assessments to help guide instruction.
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maintained one of the first School Resource Officer programs to exist in the county because the safety of our students remains our highest priority.
Over the past 13 years, the Board has invested in the district's facilities. We acquired several grants to fund the security measures under Project Guardian, fix roofs, replace windows, increase energy efficiencies, and enhance kitchen and toilet rooms. When grants were no longer available, the community supported additional debt in order to continue our tradition of maintaining our facilities
, by passing the 2015 referendum
. Maintaining our facilities has several positive impacts. First, other than geography and police services, nothing impacts residential real estate values as much as great schools. Second, having an inviting environment leads students to connect to their schools and brings school pride. Third, once facilities become run down, the cost of upkeep becomes overwhelming.
On Thursday, March 15th, the district administration and I will humbly provide our recommendations to the Board of Education to achieve a balanced budget. Maintaining programs we currently offer, maintaining the extra and co-curricular programs we currently offer, complying with the many mandates associated with special education, next generation science standards, homeless students, and state testing are all part of the next budget. We will also provide information on how to provide the much needed resources to help our students improve their reading, comprehension, and mathematics skills.
A school district budget and program offerings are complicated. The Board and administration understands there may be questions. We welcome all questions and want to provide accurate information to our community. If you have questions, please submit these directly to the district.
Questions
are answered and posted on the
district's budget website
. Also included on the website is the agenda for each meeting with various documents attached to the agenda.
It is important that our community remain connected to our process and educated about our budget in order to have a true understanding of the important financial work that needs to be done. Please join us on March 15.
Respectfully,
Mary Ann Bell
