Tuesday, April 20th, is D-Day – decision day – for the 2010-2011 Bridgewater-Raritan School Budget. Unlike most years, it’s been one of the most widely publicized budget processes in decades.
What characterizes this one from previous budgets is that it is embroiled in a statewide financial crisis, with few school districts being spared the agony of cutbacks due to reduced state aid. The numbers which have been thrown about are dizzying.
Go back a few months: What do you think would have happened, if Jon Corzine had been re-elected, instead of Chris Christie? It’s not unrealistic to assume that the B-R School District would have received most or all of its anticipated state aid. There would have been no program or personnel cutbacks, perhaps not even any outsourcing of custodians.
The Bridgewater-Raritan Education Association would not have been asked to implement a wage freeze. Negotiations for another generous multi-year contract would have begun. And everyone would be happy.
Now let’s step out of that dream.
That’s the kind of thinking that leads to addiction, in this case, financial addiction. Let’s face it, Bridgewater and Raritan brothers and sisters, we’ve been living high off the hog in this district for too long. Ours is the state with the highest cost of education and the highest taxes. It is full of cronyism, patronage and corruption.
Seniors are strapped, having lost about $1200 from the cancelled homestead rebate. They have seen their incomes plummet as the result of virtually 0% interest rates and watched their 401k’s tank. Working people of all ages and income strata in the commercial sector are being laid off from well-paying jobs.
People fortunate enough to have solid employment are looking at little or no increases in their salaries and are getting socked with ever-increasing health care premiums. Tens of thousands have lost their defined-benefit retirement plans, a benefit still enjoyed in the public sector.
The nominal unemployment rate is pushing 10%, while the actual unemployment due to discouraged laid-off workers no longer seeking employment sits at a staggering 17%.
Does anyone seriously think that the spending trend in our school districts could have been kept on its current trajectory? What astonishes me is not that the Christie medicine is being forced upon reluctant patients. What does is that not enough could see the symptoms of the disease.
Excess is excess, no matter what field it’s in. The overly-generous spending in New Jersey on most levels, including within the Bridgewater-Raritan School District reminds me of the dot.com and real estate bubbles of the last two decades. We all wanted a good time and didn’t worry until the bubbles popped in our faces.
I’ll conclude with one of the most egregiously false and age-old arguments for why school budgets are where they are – personnel salaries which comprise about 80% of the total. We have been told over and over again that these are fixed costs, implying that nothing can be done to slow their growth.
But that argument is suicidally circular, because the same school board which tells us that salaries are fixed costs and can’t be slowed because they are part of multi-year contractual agreements, are the very same school boards that negotiated those inflated agreements to begin with.
By the way, that much ballyhooed 12.8% three-year wage agreement with the Bridgewater-Raritan Education Association is in fact a three-year 13.35% wage hike. This result occurs through the magical compounding of each annual wage increase in the package over its contract period.
The school funding and spending problem in New Jersey and in our community is serious, real and now in our faces. The sooner we fix it, the better off we will all be. Jon Corzine and his predecessors are gone and they are never coming back.
It's been a long one. Thanks for reading.
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