Just like every January, school officials are preparing for the upcoming budget season. The first discussions in public about the budget are set for Tuesday, January 27, the next board meeting.
However, there is one important element that will change this year — this is the first year that school taxes will be determined based upon the amount of students sent by each township to the district, and no longer by property values.
According to district spokeswoman Gerri Hutner, school officials will be working harder this year to get information about the budget and elections out to residents. In recent years, numbers have shown that the school elections, and thus the voting on the school budgets, have been low. There is even a current proposal at the state level that would eliminate the public elections on school budgets that are under state caps, move the April school elections to the November general election, and also move the public vote on “second ballot questions” for local spending above state caps to the November general election (Board vice president Robert Johnson has a letter on this proposal — see page 2).
“We’ve been having some meetings to make sure we really educate citizens, not only on the budgets and on the proposed tax structure, but on the importance of voting,” Hutner says.
One thing that should be helpful to school officials in determining the percentage of students sent by each township for tax purposes in this year’s budget is Infinite Campus — the district’s new student database that allows parents to access their children’s demographic information, attendance, and progress reports and report cards.
“In that system, we have been going through it methodically to capture the information of where students reside,” said Hutner. “We know that Mary Smith lives in West Windsor, and John Smith lives in Plainsboro. That will be a helpful guide to give us x-number of students in this township, and that will then create the percentages for the tax levy.”
