TUF-BOE Budget adjustment 2008

Council to Review BOE Budget
May 12, 2008

On April 15th 2008 the BOE held its annual election to select BOE members and to let voters decide on the budget ($136M). Bernstein, Beals and Nagy won. The Budget did not pass. At the next BOE meeting (April 24) the BOE selected Nagy as President and Holzheimer as VP.

Because the budget failed, on Tuesday, May 13, 2008 the Township Council will vote on an adjustment of the BOE budget. Four years ago when the budget failed the Council reduced it by $250K. This was during a time when school principal Bill Grippo was Chairman of the Democratic Party. Since then the "reformed" Democrats took control of their party and they with the help of the Republican Council member paid an outside consultant $2,000 to briefly analyze the budget. This led to a cut of $1M.

This year Council allotted $8,500 for a more in depth analysis which went to the Township Council Finance Oversight Committee who met with the BOE Finance Committee. TUF requested to observe the meeting but it was closed to the public, the reason given was that discussions included informing the Council about BOE contract negotiations. TUF assumes that this meeting's purpose was to hear the BOE's comments about the analysis and to eliminate items that could not be removed from the budget due to federal and state mandates. While this meeting was closed to the public, because certain Council members attended, TUF is reasonably confident nothing untoward occurred.

The meeting produced two documents, a letter from the Township Council Finance Oversight Committee to the Township Council and a spreadsheet of recommended reductions. To the best of TUF's understanding these documents indicate that the Township Council Finance Oversight Committee is recommending a reduction of the BOE budget by $1,155,373. Apparently the BOE agreed to $140K dollars of these reductions.

While there is a large gap between $1.2M and $140K we would like to acknowledge that the BOE agreeing to any cut is a major improvement from their typical claim of "any cut will hurt the kids". Along with an under cap budget and the decision to allow the outside independent review of BOE operations we see this most recent action as an indication of a positive change in the BOE. We wonder out loud if this is the influence of the new Superintendent, Mr. Seto.

Lastly on the subject of the outside review we reported earlier that on March 4th, 2008 the BOE voted that $300K be allocated for the review. Because this money is from this year's budget the review must start by June 30th or new money would have to be found from next year's budget.

The problem is that the bid request (RFP - Request For Proposal) has yet to be published. Board secretary Mr. Calavano predicts that it will happen this week. Then vendors will have ten business days to respond. The BOE will then have to review the responses and choose one. Finally work must begin by at least June 30th. There are only two BOE meetings between when the responses come back and June 30th. It takes the BOE President or five members to call a special meeting.

Because of the almost two month delay between approval and the RFP and the tightness of the deadline a skeptic would be concerned that if the BOE merely dragged its feet or found some problem with the RFP the review will disappear. It is even possible that the passing of the money allocation for the review was an election year ploy. At the last BOE meeting Phil Kramer of TUF stated these concerns and predicted that if that were to occur any recent trust the BOE has earned with the public would be lost for years to come.

To be clear we have no evidence that review will fail to occur and are looking forward to apologizing to anyone we offended by our skepticism after the review begins.

Phil Kramer