While some federal stimulus money has come to this area, including money toward the repaving of a section of Route 1 between West Windsor and Lawrence, relatively little money has reached the WW-P school district.##M:[more]##
There are three areas in which federal stimulus money can have any effect for WW-P, according to Larry Shanok, the assistant superintendent of finance for the district.
The first is in the area of state aid. About a year ago, the state promised the school district that the new state aid funding formula would go into effect. This would have resulted in increases in state aid to the district, but in today’s economy, the state took advantage of federal stimulus money, which it used to distribute as part of the funding formula to each district, rather than using it as additional funding.
“What we would expect to be state aid is federal aid, which resulted in $157,”000 in state aid that is, in fact, coming from the federal government,” said Shanok. So in essence, the amount of state aid was maintained in most districts, and those that were in the worst shape received more funding.
The second area of funding comes from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The district received just over $2 million to use toward Individual with Disabilities Act (IDEA) funding. “That money hasn’t actually started to come yet,” said Shanok. “The first $1 million will come, I understand, in 1/9 portions. It will come monthly starting September.”
And, “we have every expectation that we will be getting the $1 million each of the two years,” Shanok added.
The third area in which the school district was hoping to receive stimulus money was with regard to shovel-ready projects. He said the Mercer County superintendent and the Mercer County executive met several months ago to talk about shovel-ready projects where dollars could be allocated. The district submitted $36 million worth of potentially shovel-ready projects, but “we never saw anything from that,” Shanok said.
Mercer County, as a whole, received $36 million, but for the “effort that got a lot of push and took a lot of time early in the year, I am not aware of any school dollars,” he added.
Regardless, he said district officials are pleased that they at least received the $2 million in IDEA funding. “All our taxpayers have paid a lot of taxes into the system, and I think it’s good that the district would be getting $2 million of that back,” he said.
