Jackson resident raises issues with school budget
NICOLAS ANTONOFF Guest Column
From the start of their condominium over the Jackson education establishment (the April 2003 school election), Superintendent of Schools Thomas Gialanella and his enabler patrons on the Board of Education (Marvin Krakower's ETeam) have been engaged in a sustained and increasingly bombastic caterwauling campaign of misdirection and misinformation (disinformation?) aimed at convincing the taxpaying electorate (and especially local and state legislators) that school budgets have to go up at double digit rates because state funding stayed flat (or "virtually flat," whatever that means) while a growing horde of new students every year over the past seven years (a total increase of 19 percent) was battering down the school doors.

When the Dec. 12, 2007 report revising the school funding formula was released, Jackson was placed in the group of districts slated to receive the minimum 2 percent increase in state aid over the 2007 total. Jackson's 2007 state aid is given as $50.901 million, which is 24 percent more than the $40.657 million Jackson got in 2000-01. That is hardly "flat" or "virtually flat" aid over the seven years.

Which may explain the Gialanella- Krakower renewed knee jerk denunciation of the 2 percent ($1.018 million) as insufficient to correct for flat aid over ... blah, blah and blah. Unsurprisingly, the Gialanella- Krakower spin on being told in their meeting with the commissioner of education to plump for more aid, "no more aid - you are getting toomuch already" was "nothing happened ... it's a very bad formula … I'm very angry."

Even a cursory reading of the report will show that the report reshuffled an additional $10.8 million into the core curriculum standards aid (renamed and redefined equalization aid) for unreserved use in the spending budget per pupil which defines the comparative cost per pupil Thorough and Efficient (T&E) spending of a district. That's the number Gialanella and board members always had (or pretended to have) difficulty explaining when asked about the real cost of educating a student in their school system.

The report also replaces the max-min T&E per pupil spending range with a singleAdequacy Budget (AB) which sets a district's "should cost" budget for providing a mandated T&E education to all its students, assuming average prudence and competence in local management of required resources identified by the parametric adequacy spending model.

For 2008-09, the AB assigned to Jackson in the report is $108.075 million, including equalization aid of $41.552 million and a local fair share (total revenue to be raised from local sources in the budget year) set at $66.523 million.

A spending budget exceeding the AB by definition includes spending on "valuable programs" (pet snakes) not required for a T&E education, for which the state feels no obligation to contribute scarce resources, and neither should we, the local taxpayers, especially in "challenging" economic times as the present.

On the upside, the board's real or feigned inept confusion finally produced onMarch 4 a "clean" if numerically messed up 2008-09 advertised budget for submission

to the county superintendent. By clean" we mean … no commissioner waivers, no phony enrollment projections. This is as close to zero base budgeting as the education establishment will ever get.

It became quickly obvious that (1) the proposed budget general fund (now called the operating budget) exceeded the permissible

S-1701 net budget growth limitation; (2) the proposed general fund tax levy shows zero reduction by excess estimated surplus as required by S-1701; (3) the budget software implementing the 2008 budget guidelines based on the A-500 legislation is preloading an incorrect value for the required local share field in the all-important Report of District Status Above/Under Adequacy (formerly the T&E range).

Board President Krakower in discussions on each of the above issues took the standard defense - "we followed directions from the Department of Education." Still, agreement was eventually reached to submit proposed fixes for all issues to the county superintendent's office for resolution, hopefully before theMarch 25 regular board meeting to approve the budget for submission to the voters.

The fix for issue (1) is simple and will result in a lower tax levy increase than the 8 cents projected as the budget now stands by applying $1.964 million free balance from net budget excess over permissible to reduce the proposed tax levy to $63.303 million. Total budgeted local share stays at $70.966 million and the net spending budget stays at $112.518 million.

Issue (2) has been with us since S-1701 hit in 2004. Gialanella, Krakower and the rest of the board vehemently and wrongly claimed over the years that every bit of surplus was applied to the budget (which is not applying it to the tax levy reduction as S-1701, A-1 and A-500 all explicitly require).

We have submitted a simple, workable fix for 2008-09 targeted at securing a zero increase in A4F tax rate over the 2007-08 rate ($2.278) to Dr. Foster at the county superintendent's office, copy to Ms. Richardson, assistant business administrator, Jackson Board of Education, as agreed with the board at the March 4 meeting. The retroactive fix of the cumulative denial of tax relief to Jackson taxpayers back to 2004-05 is more complex and will require legal counsel inputs (we are talking of upward of $15 million in misappropriated by direction funds).

The fix for issue (3) again is simple, a matter of correct cross-referencing applicable definitions in A-500 and A-1 to the 2008-09 budget guidelines and applying the correction to the current issue budget software.

Fixing the technical problems with the preparation of the 2008-09 budget should not detract attention and concern from fixing the root cause of the budget cost explosion - out of control and never validated by voter approval spending on not T&E mandated local option "valuable programs" (pet snakes) since Gialanella and the current board took over the Jackson education enterprise. That is a running fire fight that has just begun.

Nicolas Antonoff is a resident of Jackson.