Township Cuts BOE Budget

called second by committing then as um as everyone is aware oh no i'm sorry i didn't address the count of making the money but uh mrs gill this is bow and mr simons the school board and the tax committee are two distinct and separate entities we have absolutely no control over what we do who runs their meetings who are the president is who their board members are they're not appointed they're elected at large in fact there are two new board members um um the only time that the committee will have something to do with the school board is if and when the voters defeat the proposed tax study that the school board proposed that is the only time that the township committee will i think this is the ninth year out of the last 10 that the school board budget has been defeated as you all know two years ago we cut about 800 000 off they proposed two years ago there was a proposed tax increase of three and a half million dollars of which we eliminated a hundred thousand dollars last year there was a proposed tax increase of seven million dollars of which paul was born last year this year the school board adopted a proposed budget that actually had a decrease the board the school board budget actually had decreased this year and yet it was voted down again of the voters encountered by a margin of 75 to 25 approximately decided that they wanted to see something different about two weeks ago there was a tour preview it was two weeks ago the mayor tax committed an academy it's you have to sit down in two weeks and try to go through 70 to 100 million dollars and see where you can cut is a very daunting task and you know to find this quick spend a lot of hours he saved a lot of time a lot of phone calls a lot of sweat uh in hinduism and you know i think the diligence that he put into looking at this school board it was was very was you know was very preventable you know he had a he had a he had a hard decision you know on one hand here the school board had already proposed a reduction in their levy and yet the voters voted it down what does he do you know it's hard to it's one thing that they would have come in with a huge decrease you could understand you want to explain what they do have to listen to is how much we are proposing um based on isaac's recommendation from closing the cut to the school levy an additional cut of 150 000 isaac came up with those numbers through discussions that he had with the administration school board members and and other members of the public and many members of the public some of which are sitting here and the budget is very very unclear and and because of the circumstances anytime i ask questions it was hard to get an answer sometimes i got multiple answers to the same thing it was very hard to work with and i didn't feel comfortable making cuts because i'm not an educator i tried to comb through it and find errors and many that i got answers for some were satisfactory someone had that satisfactory but i still do not feel comfortable as some of you have pointed out from the public there are two line items on the resolution those deal with the community school it has come to our attention that rather than a recommended cut to the community school that there is a savings in the insurance line and the insurance premiums that the schools were budgeted for and it seems that their insurance premiums are not going to be as high as what they they have in their budget so i'm going to ask based on this recommendation mr cole's recommendation that we change the line item from the two then the two accounts here we're going to change that we're um please amend his motion to include to remove the two line items that are sitting in our resolution and replace it with long items which deals specifically with health and with uh this is a line item that deals with your vision with the school of vision and dental health insurance this is a line item that has come to our attention that there's room in there and this i think satisfies everyone's everyone's concern that the quality level and overall scope of the education this is something that comes straight out of the health insurance line that they don't need uh or they they claim that they have been over-budgeted because they pre-maintain less than what they had anticipated i know how little appreciation you get for it and all of the grief that you took forward and on behalf of the committee thanks for um also want to thank the committee for changing the line item uh initially we were told that this school board was willing to eliminate the community school and while the community school is really not where it was maybe five or ten years ago it still provides a very very important asset to this community and even though an organization like saint francis um moderates the ged programs these mother adult education programs esl for one it's a community school that gets the word out and kind of administers that for people it also provides pretty much the only services um taken advantage of by the senior community there's 50 somewhat classes that are offered ranging from photography to ballroom dancing to computer skills and one thing you might be left about the knitting club but what people don't understand is that for a lot of these folks this is the only activity they have outside of their homes this is a way that people are getting out of their homes getting involved with other people and sometimes it makes a big difference in their lives so i'm very proud that we're able to um maintain a community school i'd like to see in the future grow and i'd really like to thank the committee for going along with that and keeping a very very vital service for a portion of our population that sometimes feels underserved so uh thank you well you know ray i think that it's important to thank isaac here because you know hearing the note hearing the concerns that he had and regarding the fact that he was able to dig and come up with this line item on the helmet so we could all feel comfortable not having to um um and thank you very someone new wins the much this year so that there's a question next year but uh why don't you ask guys if we had it mom let's go welcome