Letter to Community about School Funding:

Our schools are being threatened as never before as the New Jersey Legislature goes into the final days of preparing the state budget for Fiscal ’05. Two bills-- S1701 and A99--currently pending will drastically restrict schools’ abilities to raise revenues, without addressing the real issues before us—spiraling health insurance and energy costs, the high price of unfunded mandates and the escalating cost of special education. The bills also do nothing to attack the real reason why property taxes are too high—the overreliance on property taxes to fund education.

The Governor’s FAIR proposals seek to punish schools by cutting the amount that schools can keep in surplus for emergencies from 6% to 3%. They seek to limit school budget increases to 2.5% annually without regard for enrollment growth, the costs of running and staffing new buildings or paying for the soaring costs of employee benefits. If these pieces of legislation are passed, every non-Abbott school district in the state will be affected. Many of them will be forced to cut programs and lay off tenured employees.

Please tell our legislators what you think of this latest attempt to score political points at the expense of our children. The emergency is real, and the time is now. Open your e-mail address books, get copies of the attached letter up on school websites and community bulletin Boards, send it to your local dailies and weeklies. Contact information for legislative leaders is also included. 

If we do not act now, we will all pay dearly in the near future