Saving School Elections

I’m surprised at how many respected public voices seemed to have gently caved in at the prospect of taking away a voter’s right to register a simple up or down vote on annual school budgets in New Jersey.

In exchange for moving school board elections from April to November, the New Jersey legislature may pass, and the Corzine administration may sign into law a provision which would, as part of that change in timing, take away the right of New Jersey voters to say yea or nay to individual budget proposals across The Garden State.

New Jersey needs to get with the program and to move its school elections to November. But, -- and this is a critical “but” – what is even more crucial than when school elections are held is what New Jersey citizens get to vote on.

Voting on the school budget itself is far more important than voting for individual board members. The reason is simple: Put pressure directly on the budget and you automatically bring pressure to bear on both the board of education and the administration to hold down costs. Anyone who doesn’t believe that should look back to last April’s organizational strength behind the successful and highly-targeted lobbying effort to promote voting in favor of the Bridgewater-Raritan school budget.

Every group which lobbied in favor of the Bridgewater-Raritan budget knew from experience that Bridgewater Township would have had to make reductions to bring a failed budget below the cap level. That’s why, under the present system, budgets are nearly always presented to voters at cap, a number which has been consistently above the rate of inflation: Boards and administrations always fear that voters may reject budgets; therefore budgets are presented to voters at cap. This makes it easier to pare back the numbers should voters disagree.

Getting the school budget question off the ballot in exchange for moving elections to November is only the first step at disenfranchising voters. The next lobbying effort will be to increase, make exceptions to, or eliminate the cap on spending. Remember where you first read this.