The presentation began with the budget goals and priorities for the coming year. The most important goals were:
- maintain and/or enhance ALL instructional programs
- upgrade technology
- enhance staff professional development
- update social studies resources
- focus on student achievement.
- enhance 'Project Lead The Way'
State Aid has not been announced yet for the 2018-19 school year, but it is expected to remain flat for the coming year, still about 10% below its high in 2009-10, when the Christie Administration slashed school funding. Announcements on State Aid are expected in mid-March.
The preliminary budget is expected to require a 3.32% increase in revenues, which would equate to about a 1.6% increase in the portion of your property taxes that goes to the Evesham Township School District. Currently, a little over 40% of property taxes are allocated to the Evesham School District.
This increase would include the 2% CAP tax levy increase, the health care waiver and a small portion of the banked cap. (The health care waiver allows a district to go over the cap if health care costs have substantially increased.) What this would mean to homeowners is that the tax rate for ETSD will be going from 1.1599 to 1.1789 (1.9 cents per $100 of assessed value). For an average home assessment of $270,500, the increase in taxes would be $51.29 to a total of $7,787.42. It was noted during the presentation that an increase of 1 cent in the rate brings an additional $1,049,354 to the school budget.
There were only a few questions from the public on varied topics, including: whether the upcoming teacher's contract is included in this budget (the first year of the contract is), how the school district and/or Whitehall gets approved development information for the demographic studies (they have to OPRA the information from the town), whether SRO money is in the budget ($250,000 is), and what 'Misc Revenue' entailed.
There were a few items that I wanted to follow up on after the meeting, which is the reason it took me several days to post this recap. There was a question from the public regarding what the line item 'Other District Costs' entailed. Mr Scavelli advised that it includes SRO costs, Evans property taxes and a few other items.
The mention of Evans property tax reminded me that several months ago at the 10/26/17 School Board meeting, the school district solicitor Mr Donio brought new business before the council, asking for a motion to file an appeal of the tax bill that was placed on Evans. While Evans was open as an Evesham Township school, the building and property were tax exempt. When part of the building was leased to a for-profit company, YALE, the property would no longer be tax exempt. While considering the lease to YALE, the school district had estimated property taxes would be $113,000. When they received the tax bill, it was for $205,447.74.
Mr Donio wanted to appeal the tax bill, and it was approved by the board vote of 8-1 in October (only Mr Student voted in the negative, stating that at the time of negotiations with YALE, he had stated 'adamantly' that the tax estimate was low). At the time, I had assumed that the school district and town disagreed on the amount of the assessment. What I hadn't considered at the time was that the property was not reassessed.
The property is still assessed at the same value it was when it was a functioning ETSD school. Only the exempt status changed. However, a review of the tax form used to apply for tax exempt status specifically asks the question: 'percentage of property leased'.
YALE is only renting a portion of Evans. In addition to YALE, the school district uses several rooms at Evans for administrative purposes. And as of 2/15/2017 (after the tax bill was issued), it was agreed to rent part of Evans to the Lenape Regional High School District.
Based on the tax bill shown above, it is apparent that the town has determined that the property is fully taxable. While I cannot verify it and I am certainly not a tax attorney, I would guess that the grounds for appeal is that the building is not fully commercial - that it is partially unoccupied and partially in use by Evesham Township School District, and therefore only the percent of the property being used for commercial purposes should be taxable. Unfortunately, we the taxpayers now have to pay the school board attorney to appeal the bill, which will be defended by the taxpayer paid town attorney, over whether we, the taxpayers should have to pay taxes on the Evans property.
The other item I wanted to follow up on concerned "Other Misc. Revenues". It was listed on the projected budget at a little over $2.5 million for the 2018-2019 school year. These revenue items include things such as ECC, paid pre-Kindergarten, paid full-day Kindergarten, Reading Recovery training and the YALE lease. Mr Scavelli pointed out that the $2.5 million in revenue far exceeds what most districts are able to produce, and it has been increasing over the past several years - Mr Recchinti, the School Business Administrator, confirmed during the meeting that the total was $890,000 in the 2010-11 school year.
I wanted to follow up on this, to see if the ETSD was indeed able to bring in more revenue that surrounding districts. The chart below shows total non tax revenues for the school districts in their User Friendly anticipated 2017-2018 budgets (last years). The anticipated budgets were the only ones I could find to compare apples to apples. These can be easily found by googling 'Evesham schools user friendly budget', or whatever town you want to see.
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| 2017-2018 User Friend Budgets, Anticipated Revenues |
The closest school in revenue to Evesham is Cherry Hill, but they are operating on a budget nearly three times as large as Evesham. Evesham's number is expected to increase to more than $2.5 million for 2018-2019.
Finally, it should be noted that all the budget numbers are preliminary. State Aid is not announced until March, revenue from paid tuition and other sources are estimates. The actual budget is not scheduled to be adopted until a special meeting of the School Board on May 3rd.
The next school board meeting will occur at 7pm on February 22nd at DeMasi.