POINT PLEASANT — The Point Pleasant Board of Education has revised and adopted its 2024-2025 budget in the wake of a new bill signed into law by Gov. Phil Murphy on May 14.
One day after the board initially passed its initial 2024-2025 budget of $50,902,143, Gov. Murphy signed into law Senate Bill No. S3081, which directly relates to S2 losses (S2 is the state’s school-aid funding formula).
Gov. Murphy issued a press release stating: “With this legislation, we are giving local school districts critical support during trying times, as difficult financial realities muddy the already complex process of adopting a balanced budget. I am pleased to provide relief to school districts facing reductions in aid and, as we look ahead, I anticipate working alongside Commissioner Dehmer to ensure our tax dollars are being used responsibly to uplift all of our students.”
The board held a second reading and public comment for the revised budget at Monday night’s meeting, seeing a 5.93% increase in school taxes for the average taxpayer. This will result in roughly a $256 increase for the average assessed home, which is $400,900 in Point Pleasant Borough.
The new general budget would be $52,826,268, a nearly $2,000,000 increase from the previously passed budget of $50,902,143. The local tax levy on this would equate to $43,351,311. The special revenues fund, which consists primarily of grants, is $1,550,000. Total debt service equates to $1,138,215, which all adds up to a total budget of $55,514,483.
School Business Administrator Christina Fessler previously said, “Our local tax levy makes up 81% of our budget. We are not highly funded by the state, especially with S2 cuts in recent years. Our state aid only accounts for about 8% of our total budget.”
Since S2’s implementation in 2017, the Point Pleasant School district has lost upward of $2.3 million in state aid, or 41%.
Fessler told The Ocean Star, “Under this legislation, we were able to do one of our choosing: One thing was if you lost state aid for the 24-25 school year, it restored part of it, so you were able to reopen your budget for state aid loss.”
The Point Pleasant Borough School District did not see any significant state aid loss from last year’s S2 funding, the first year in S2’s history the district did not lose any money. This meant Point Pleasant Borough was ineligible to opt into this part of the bill.
“The second piece of the legislation allowed boards of education to reopen their budgets and they were able to increase their local tax levy up to the lesser of how much state aid they lost from the 2021 to the 2024-2025 (year) or 9.9% in total,” said Fessler. “When we went back into the budget software, we were nowhere near the 9.9%, we capped out at $1,324,125.”
Fessler further said, “There have been a lot of cuts to positions as well as capital maintenance projects that we have pushed off for the sake of operations. With funding cuts over the last eight years under S2, the money simply wasn’t there. At this point, we are playing catch-up.”
She explained there are a number of positions that still need to be restored, such as special education teachers at the elementary schools that can be filled if the school were to recoup their losses under this legislation.
The biggest expense for the school district’s budget is salaries and benefits, which take up over 55% of the budget in salaries alone, with benefits taking up almost 18% of the budget.
During Fessler’s presentation at the June 17 meeting, she explained that this $1.9 million the school can recoup can be used for: a new minivan for the transportation department; HVAC for Nellie Bennett’s renovated locker room, which is now a physical therapy room; two full-time special education teachers at the elementary schools; local funding needed for grant loss; a middle school social studies teacher; Ocean Road bathroom renovations; maintenance increases, including construction overages; HVAC for the middle school, including additional funds for project overages and HVAC controls for the middle and high school. A few of these HVAC projects are already being 40% funded through ROD (regular operating district) grants.
“Things are just more expensive in an inflationary environment we live in…It costs a lot to run a school district…The state aid allocation doesn’t mean our costs go down, it means we have to make it up somewhere in force or salaries or, in this case, we can also increase the tax levy,” Fessler previously told The Ocean Star.
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