Northern Valley education officials said $7.4 million would have to be cut from the district’s budget should it have to meet what the state deems to be the "adequate" cost of education for the area.
Northern Valley Superintendent Jan Furman said there is currently no reason to believe the district would have to make such a drastic cut but the figure was provided at a recent Board of Education meeting in response to a request from the advocacy group Dollars & Sense.
Dollars & Sense has filed a brief with the state Supreme Court arguing on behalf of suburban districts such as Northern Valley, claiming that the state’s funding formula is not fair to more affluent districts.
"There was a request from Dollars & Sense as they are participating at the legislative level with these discussions of a new funding formula, that suburban districts convey to Legislators what it would look like if they had to come down to a level of adequacy," Furman said.
Furman stressed that she is hearing nothing "that’s telling us we’re going to have to reduce our budgets to that amount." But she said the concern is that, given the state’s financial crisis, there may be incentive to cut suburban districts down to adequacy since that could alleviate the burden of providing exorbitant amounts of state aid to other districts.
Providing the seven million- dollar figure was as far as the district would go with responding to Dollars & Sense, despite a model Ramsey provided that the group asked the districts to follow, which conveyed specific projections of areas that would yield cuts.
"Our response was that we are not comfortable saying what it would look like in the Northern Valley because if that ever happened I would not be the one, without input from the community, to slash seven million out of the budget," said Furman. "The board … can’t make projections … without significant input from the community. We would have to look at the whole program because seven million dollars is significant."
"If we don’t use Ramsey’s model what would it look like? I can’t answer that because [it would take a lot of work] to come up with that model and if we do use Ramsey’s model and the community sees [these cuts] and doesn’t understand it could cause a huge panic and be divisive," she said.
Director of Communications for the New Jersey School Board Association, Frank Belluscio, explained that the adequacy figure is "what the state’s school funding formula determines is the amount necessary to provide an adequate education."
He said most districts spend above that amount, a figure that is determined by factors such as the school level, whether elementary, secondary or middle school, as well as instruction costs, extra curricular activities and other factors.
However, the adequacy figure determined by this formula, said Furman, is not realistic for districts such as Northern Valley, which are recognized for their scholastic excellence.
"Adequacy as defined by [that formula] would not be considered adequate to communities of the Northern Valley because of expectations. And the cost of doing business in Bergen County is more expensive than doing business in South Jersey," she said.
Co-founder and director of Dollars & Sense, Richard Snyder, agrees.
"Our contention in the brief says that adequacy as it is defined by the formula for suburban districts is not accurate. The level of adequacy for suburban districts has never been studied, those numbers have never been compiled by the court or by the Department of Education so the level determined to be adequate is not reflective of what we know the word adequacy to mean," Snyder said.
Snyder said the aim of Dollars & Sense is to be part of any fact-finding mission the court remands to determine areas of curricular importance. "We would like to be at the table to point out that things like extra curricular activities, multiple world languages and business education classes are critical to what we do in the district," said Snyder.
He said that while the state is not telling districts to come under adequacy, they are punished for being above it.
"They are not permitted to raise certain funds and must put certain funds back to property tax relief which is insignificant to taxpayers and significant to schools," he said.
To help with the group’s plea, Snyder hopes to get from Northern Valley the budget’s explanatory statement, which details programs and services that are in excess of adequacy.
Snyder said Dollars & Sense has requested a similar breakdown from districts in Middletown and Cherry Hill, which are "working on putting it together."
