JACKSON – The Township School District received the devastating news that instead of losing $2.5 million in state aid for next year it would actually be losing $6.2 million.
This is $3.7 million more than anticipated, based on reduction projections prescribed under the S-2 state aid funding cuts.
“We have been in a place for several years where we had to make hard decisions,” Superintendent Nicole Pormilli said.
She explained the state law passed in 2018 known as S-2 “drastically impacted the state aid that we had received. This compounds over time. We are working toward the end of our S-2 seven-year cuts. We are at year five.”
With the now deeper cut, the school district, over the course of seven years, will have lost $23 million in state aid.
Pormilli said, “we have fought through a state aid crisis for the past five years, which was just made exponentially worse. We have rising expenses in the millions due to state-mandated services we must provide to all resident students.
“We have exhausted our surplus and like you, just about everything we need to purchase to run this district has gone up in price. This crisis is not the result of any one specific budgetary item. It has been accumulating over the past several years with enormous and unexplainable cuts to our state aid,” she added.
In a letter to the public, Pormilli said she wanted to alert residents “to the severity of the situation and to continue our commitment to providing factual, candid and comprehensive information about our situation and plans as they develop. We are still in the midst of analyzing every single element in order to make hard decisions and find creative solutions to maintain the integrity of our educational program. We are still very much in the thick of that process and we strongly encourage you to not view rumors or speculation as fact,” she added.
“As always, we will present thorough and detailed plans and proposals in public and will share them with the school community. To lose $6.2 million – on top of the $16 million we have already lost in state aid cuts over the past five years is – utterly devastating,” she added.
“We will be forced to make some very hard decisions and come up with some very creative solutions over the next few weeks. We are in the midst of that process now, and we are committed to keeping the public informed at every turn about our plans to try to maintain the integrity of our educational programs,” she added.
Board President Giuseppe Palmeri said, “our first priority is the students and any decision that the Board of Education makes is made with the best intentions of our students in mind. I encourage anyone with questions or concerns to please attend our meetings.”
“If you don’t want to participate publicly during a meeting, come talk to us afterwards or reach out to us. We will be more than happy to hear you out and answer any questions or concerns,” he added.
Pormilli said, “we are still in the midst of analyzing every single element in order to make hard decisions and find creative solutions to maintain the integrity of our educational program. We strongly encourage you to not view rumors or speculation as fact. As always, we will present thorough and detailed plans and proposals in public and will share them with the school community.”
A public hearing on the proposed budget will be held at 6:30 p.m. April 26 in the Fine Arts Center of Jackson Memorial High School.
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