001I pledge algiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Almost sitting on the floor. Okay. Good evening and welcome to the South River Board of Education Public Budget Hearing uh for Monday, April 28th, 2025. In compliance with the Open Public Meeting Act, chapter 231, Laws of 1975 of the state of New Jersey, adequate notice of this meeting of the South River Board of Education was provided in the following manner. On April 10th, 2025, the notice was delivered to the office of the South River Burough Clerk and posted at the Board of Education Administration building. On April 10th, 2025, the notice was faxed mailed to the following newspapers. Home News Tribune, The Star
002Ledger. On April 10th, 2025, the notice was posted at the South River Burough Clerk's office. Mr. Rosa, would you please call the role? Mr. Basa here. Mr. Budson here. Mrs. Bush here. Mrs. Laauo here. Mr. Nielsen here. Mrs. Sowski here. Mrs. Yung Yao here. Mrs. Urbanic here. You have a call. Thank you. Uh, so tonight's meeting is the public hearing for our board of education budget. Uh, at this time I'm going to turn the meeting over to our superintendent and our chair of the finance committee, Liz L. Great. Thank you. Yes, I was going to say Dr. Zer. Okay. All right. I'll take it from here. Thank you. Um, so what I have for you um tonight is an overview of the budget um based on the tentative budget that the board already approved. Uh
003and upon your approval of this final budget, we will be sending this over to the county for approval. Um again, um this presentation begins with an overview of how the budget process um flows from start to finish. Um you will see that this budget addresses student programs uh instruction, academic improvement as well as facilities and maintenance, staffing, professional development. So this budget is aligned of course first and foremost with student needs with our district goals and with performance data. Equity, access, and opportunity for all students has been um a big factor in the planning of this budget. Uh as well as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Every Student Succeeds Act, which we are mandated to also follow and address through our budget. and of course our New Jersey student learning standards which again
004to be compliant we also have to ensure that our curriculum instructional programs and resources are based on these standards. So how did we get here to our budget? Uh we held stakeholder meetings to assess that uh to assess the needs and to make sure that they align um with available school and district resources. The participants for these meetings uh included staff, parents and students through climate and culture surveys, district administration, the board of education's finance committee, and finally the full board when they uh reviewed the tentative budget at its initial phase. Some considerations um definitely are NJ DOE requirements, increased costs for students with special needs, maintenance is a big one for us. We want to make sure that we are maintaining our facilities, federal and state mandates, safety and security needs, charter schools which
005we are obligated to include as part of our budget, contractual obligations, salary and benefit increases and of course some of the alignment that I referenced in the prior slide. On the next slide, we have some costsaving mechanisms. Um, we of course participate in cooperative consorcas, um, cooperative pricing systems. We look at revenue sources, uh, outside of just state and federal funding as well. Uh, we look for ed data services to help us get the best prices on certain resources, materials, services. the Educational Services Commission as well as the Somerset County Educational Services Commission. Transportation, we look at whatever savings we can gather there. And then of course grant allocation and grant management as part of our revenue source. So, the process really um involves administrators drafting um school and department budgets consistent with all of
006these um aligned um mandates that I just discussed. And then the board finance committee, the business administrator and myself, we review the budget proposals to ensure effectiveness and to assure efficiency. Then the board of education, as I mentioned before, approves the tentative as well as the Middle Sex County before we move into this last and final phase of the budget process. So, what will we be able to do with this budget? Our schools will continue to be fully staffed with qualified personnel. We continue to be able to um have appropriate class size, instructional resources and technology that will be updated and aligned to the standards um that I mentioned are mandated instructional programs and also mental health supports. Let's talk about what's new in this budget. I've categorized um the new components available to us
007through this budget in uh three different categories. Student programs, instruction, and academic improvement, facilities and security, staffing and professional development. And you can see that we have various categories under each of these um elements. And um I won't read every single one on this list, but I'll highlight a few that are uh important. For example, in instructional, we are adding another AP course in psychology. Very important, and we have student interest in that. Additional mental health services for students in K12 um as well as continuing mental health services through our EAP program for staff. We're also looking at um different things in our arts programs. For example, um a kill for for pottery class. That's also been a class that is um really well attended with a lot of interest and we just need the
008equipment to service the amount of students. Um JB boys volleyball. This is a new team. We've been continuously year after year adding to the volleyball program. Um where now we are at JV boys volleyball and able to add that. We are updating and replacing some of our Chromebooks and um we have a brand new language arts reading program. This is a large expense in this budget because it's servicing all of our students in K5. So, we are due for a program. We've had our existing program um for five years. And good instructional practice is that to stay current, you're going to update those resources every five years in order to make sure that they continue to be aligned with the standards as they change. So that is a large expenditure in this budget but definitely
009one that is necessary um and that will ensure our students keep making academic progress in facilities and security. Um we are looking at a uh projector and sound system at the primary school and elementary school. Um we need a new tractor. Uh our current tractor is about 20 years old. That's a large expense but definitely one that's needed. We need a new paging system. The paging system at the elementary and middle school is original to that school. Um, and really it's it's outdated and needs um needs to be updated. Wireless access controls. The elementary school is now the very last school that will have the automatic locks on the doors, the electronic ones. We've been phasing this project year after year. Elementary School will now be done over the summer and will be the last
010um school offense for the turf field. We continue to have some challenges and struggle with um the use of that field and um the misuse of that field, I should say. Um so we did budget for fencing at the turf field, therefore limiting access to permit use only. um baseball dugouts. We were able to do the uh softball dugouts this spring. There was an existing retaining wall in that area. So that was the one side of the field that we could do without um extending the project beyond the season. So now we'll do the boys side, the baseball side over the summer and they will have the same type of dugouts that the softball team has. Um, and we're looking at potentially being able to bring the um the stadium press box um and being
011able to add a modular press box in order to really facilitate um what's needed for uh for the football program. In staffing and professional development, we're looking at presentations that continues to support anti-bullying and social emotional learning. uh traffic safety staff. We're looking at this is u a a conversation that has been ongoing throughout the year for the safety and risk committee. Uh so we're looking to see how we could staff some support for traffic safety. Um we're looking at an audiovisisual coordinator because we are bringing in some new audiovisisual technology and we need a trained person to make sure that that equipment is used properly and maintained properly. um the JV volleyball coach, which goes along with adding that team. Um a special ed supervisor replacing one of our current school social workers as
012well as the ESY coordinator and the alternative educational program staff. We started this program midy year. Um that is the chance program it's called currently and we're looking to continue that program into the coming year with a few changes. We've learned some things. um this year and how we want to continue that program. But definitely it exists in our budget as it is one of the expenditures that keeps our out of district costs down um but also serves our our children in our own district which is really important for them. Okay. You can see on your way in you could see we are adding the um board of education educational annex of three classrooms. We are funding this through an SDA grant from the NJ DOE. I should say partially gr uh funding it this
013way and we are looking to open that addition for January of 2026. This gives us ample time to really finish up the construction to really be able to move the furniture in. um and to get the the classroom annex ready. Um but you can see in this budget that we are um facilitating not through the local not through local funds but through our preschool aid grant. Um we're looking to um have furniture in all those new classrooms, sensory room supplies, instructional technology, all of that will be grant funded. custodial services, security, a phone system, and then for now we will have at minimum two prek teachers and two par profofessionals. So we know for sure we will equip two of the three classrooms immediately. So this is how our expenditure percentages play out and you
014can see the largest percentage is going to instruction as it should. Um special education is a large percentage as well. Operations um benefits for our employees as well. Those are our main expenditures. But you can also see where our expenditures are in terms of capital projects um debt service and so on as well. Any questions on anything that I've presented so far? No, I have no questions. Nope. Okay. So, for the next part, I'm going to turn it over to Mr. Rosa, who's going to go over some of the figures and the tax impact of this budget. Thank you, Dr. Zer. All right. So, I'll jump right into our um revenue source. Uh so, it's broken down into different categories. The first one is the uh excess surplus from prior year. which is about 2.8
015million. Um this year we had a little reduction of debt uh debt service levy. Um our local tax levy about $19 million. This also includes the healthc care uh um adjustment. Um our state aid uh we had a little reduction as well about 1.9% uh reduction to two 32 million 707,280 our other state funds this is mostly our non-public funds um our Medicaid uh reimbursement for semi significant uh reduction there about 85% um our student activity accounts our miscell miscellaneous income um from our uh use of facilities and other u miscellaneous items. Um our preschool aid um 3.1 million. Um anticipated federal funds, we anticipate a uh reduction there. and our capital and maintenance reserve withdrawal to our capital outlay is about 870,000 which gives us a total of 61,161,580. Um that's a 26,787 reduction
016from the year before. We'll move on to our expenditures. As uh Dr. As Zer mentioned before, construction is our major uh our highest expense at 27.7%. Followed by um operations at 17.3, our employee benefits and uh at 16.4 and um special education at 15.3. You can see the actual dollar amounts on this slide which uh equate to our revenues. Okay, our next slide is our lease purchase payments and where we are uh progressing towards the end of these payments. Um the cafeteria equipment um we started in 2021 will be done by 2026. This is the last payment we're doing for that. We have the desk purchase that we did in 2023 for the for the full district will be done by 2027. and our early learning center. Uh we also start in 2023 and we'll
017also will be done by 2028. So I wanted to illustrate some of the losses that we had in this budget. Um as I mentioned before, the state aid is about 1.88% um reduction from the year before. for our prek aid. Um it's about 25% reduction on the unfunded expansion, meaning we asked for expansion. We didn't get we would have gotten an additional 25% but it was not funded. um our semi reimbursement uh federal program we lost about 80% and we're still waiting on our ESA um allocations to know uh exactly what that number would be but they have told us to expect um about a 25% loss there and this gives us a total loss of about $1.4 million. So moving on to staffing and health care costs. This is our major cost. This contributes
018about 52% of our total budget or $34,330,416. Um this is 5.38% increase from the year before. Um so with a relatively flat um budget, we still have to make up this 5.38% and we have done that in this budget. Thanks to all the shareholders, especially to uh Miss Miasel who's sitting here in the public today who helped us with the budget and um Dr. Zer and all the meetings and um collaboration that we had. Moving on to uh a snapshot of revenues and expenditures. As I mentioned before, revenue expenditures always match at 61,161,580. Um our capital reserve balance um we did use $670 uh,000 which was to fund some of our projects and uh maintenance reserve balance we did use about $200,000 for um for that as well which gets added to our revenues. So,
019how does this impact the taxpayer? Um, based on the rateables of the town and the average household of 293,268, this illustrates a 1.31% increase or $108 uh monthly and a yearly rate of $120. I want to put some statistical analysis here. So, um the per pupil cost the state versus South River. If we look at the last available uh numbers that we have from the state, which is 2324, the state is spending about $20,154 per pupil. Um South River is spending $16,77. So we still consider under adequate we are under adequacy spending for about $10 million $78,000. And then the rest of the slides just illustrates as I said some statistical data. Our enrollment uh about 1% uh decrease our special ed um population expected to be a 2.47% 47% increase. Our English language learners
020um expecting a.35% increase and our free and reduced um application students are uh 53.12%. And that concludes my portion if anyone has any questions. No questions, but great job everyone. Um, and I have to go back to what Tony used to say all the time. Let me get back to that page where the charter schools, uh, it dropped, which is nice. I mean, it's I'd still like to have that $1,992,000 in our budget instead of having to give it out to charter schools. It was always a thorn in Tony's side. And I promised them that I would always bring it up during budget hearings as long as I was here, that that's money that should stay in the districts, that people found a way to get around it and go to a religious school and
021uh take money out of our pocket. But otherwise, you all did a great job considering how we've been screwed over again by the governments of this great state and nation. Um, you know, can't say anything bad about what he's did. Camille, thank you. and the staff, please let them know that uh we appreciate everything they've done. At least I do. I speak for myself. Um so, great job everyone. And I'd like to to thank I don't know who made the presentation to the three of you, but it's very readable for an outsider to look at. It's very self-explanatory. So, I have to say thank you to that. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Do any other board members have any comments, questions, anything to add? I'm just going to speak in terms of the finance committee that
022um and you were also present at the meeting that we uh when we went through it before we initially submitted it um for review that there were a lot of components and even since then it wasn't a matter of like it stopped. like there was always some tweaking going on just to make sure we were at the right place for with the right programs. And that's what's great about how we work. It's that it while it's final, there's room if something were to come out and come in our favor, it would just be more for teachers and um for the kids and in the end that's what matters. So, um, I appreciate in terms of the committee, we appreciate everything that, uh, was that was put into this budget and arriving at this. So, thank
023you. Okay. So, at this time, Mrs. Well, do you have a motion? Public public comment first. Public, right? Oh, okay. Because All right. It was listed differently. So, at this time, I'd like to open up the meeting to the public for any comments or concerns that they may have for the board. And if you come to the podium, please state your name and address. And please keep your comments to a 10-minute time limit. And this will be on first call, on second call, and on third call. This public portion will be closed. And now at this time, Mrs. Low. Um, the finance committee upon recommendation of the superintendent recommends the 2526 budget be approved in accordance. And I so move. We have a motion by Mrs. Second. And we have a second by Vice President
024Nielsen. All in favor? I. Motion carries. The budget is approved by the board. Okay, thank you. And now a motion for adjournment of hearing. Vice President Nielsen. Second. Second by Mrs. Saddowski. All in favor? Thank you. Meetings. Do you need attention? Yep.