Next Tuesday, April 21st, when the polls open in the morning, you will be asked to vote yes or no on the proposed $133.2 million school budget. If you have gone to administration presentations, especially if you are a parent, you’ve been told, among other claims, that there isn’t much that can be pared back.
The biggest portion of that $133.2 million tab consists of personnel costs which are now running at 81.3%. We are consistently advised that personnel costs are fixed. The assumption is that that they simply cannot be controlled. Try telling that to the millions of other Americans who are on the ever-expanding unemployment lines.
The fact is that the recent Bridgewater-Raritan Boards of Education and their administrations have done a completely insufficient job of managing people costs. Less than two years ago, this board negotiated a three-year wage hike just a shade under 13%, a number completely out-of-line with inflation and with personnel performance criteria. Today, inflation is running near zero.
If that wage hike had been just 50% of what it is, the budgets during the current three-year wage increase period would be less by millions of dollars.
This school tax eats up 64% of Bridgewater’s real estate tax levy. And things won’t get better in Bridgewater or Raritan, until the Board of Education realizes what’s going on in the real world and acknowledges that the education establishment is part of that world.
No comments:
Post a Comment