Vo-tech
funding vexing
Officials across county say
tuition charges will hurt their finances.
Sunday, November 27, 2005 • By SARA LEITCH •
The Express-Times
Warren County officials are incensed by
the Warren County Technical School board's decision to start
charging local districts for each student they send to the
school.
"This is a school that's been funded
through the state and through the county freeholder board,
never through tuition," Phillipsburg Councilman James Shelly
said. "This is an incredible change that's totally
unfair."
The vo-tech school board voted Oct. 19 to
institute tuition charges, saying they were forced to do so
by state lawmakers who have not increased their funding for
years. The Warren County freeholders in March voted to
increase county funding for the school by 3.5 percent, to
$3.8 million.
About 52 percent of the school's budget
is funded through county tax revenue. Currently, the
remainder is funded with state aid and grants. But next
fall, municipalities that send students to the vo-tech
school will have to chip in, too.
The board plans to charge sending
districts an annual tuition of $2,175 for regular education
students and $3,250 for special education students,
beginning in the 2006-07 school year.
If state funding remains flat, those
tuitions will rise to $2,425 for regular education students
and $3,781 for special education students in the 2010-11
school year.
That's still less than the more than
$10,000 school districts pay to send students to other high
schools in the county, said Alan Namoli, superintendent of
Warren County Technical School district.
"A lot of vo-techs charge a lot more,"
Namoli said. "We provide the transportation as
well."
But some local school districts that also
haven't seen increased state funding in years say they'll
have a hard time coming up with the thousands of dollars in
technical school tuition they hadn't expected to
pay.
Phillipsburg faces the hardest hit. The
town sends 74 students to the technical high school, about
one-fifth of the student body. Shelly says the new tuition
charges will mean the school district needs to raise
$170,000 in new taxes, a 3 cent increase in the tax
rate.
"You're looking at between $35 and $100
for every property owner in the town," Shelly said. "I think
the county freeholders should find the money as they have
for the last 40 years and fund their high school, their
Warren County Technical School, as they've always
done."
Harmony Township is facing about $50,000
in tuition fees for the 23 students it sends to the
technical school.
"$50,000 is a lot of money," chief school
administrator Vicki Pede said. "We're under a strict budget
cap, and state aid has not changed in five years. This is a
new expenditure for us."
Because the state limits growth in school
budgets to 2.5 percent a year, Harmony won't be able to
simply increase its budget by the amount of new tuition
payments. The school district will have to look at ways to
rework its budget to find money for the tuition, Pede
said.
"It's money we hadn't budgeted because we
hadn't had to pay for technical school before," she said.
"We'll have to make decisions here."
Not every school district is crying foul
over the tuition payments. Ronald Rush, Belvidere's school
business administrator said he's in favor of them, if
charging tuition helps cut county taxes.
"The people who use it should pay for it,
more than everyone paying Phillipsburg's share," Rush said.
"If they're using most of the facility, it would only seem
fair their taxpayers pay for it."
Belvidere currently sends 10 students to
the technical high school.
A group of superintendents plan to write
a letter to the technical school's board highlighting their
concerns about the tuition cost, said Alfred Annunziata,
Hope Township's chief school administrator.
He said he understood why freeholders
felt they couldn't make up the difference in county funds
and thereby force the school to charge tuition.
"They're politically between a rock and a
hard place, too, because they'd have to raise county taxes,
and that's never a popular decision," Annunziata said. "But
each local community's been in that situation for years
because the state funding rate has been flat. We've all had
to raise property taxes higher than we'd like because we
have to make up for the shortfall from the state. Now
they're just adding to that."
Freeholder Director Richard Gardner said
he hopes the county would be able to increase its share of
the school's funding in future years, but he noted that he
answers to taxpayers from the entire county, not just
specific municipalities.
"If we have the opportunity to shoulder
more of the burden, we can probably do that," Gardner said.
"But we're dealing, like municipal governments are, with the
cap law We'll see what happens with a new governor coming
in. Maybe, hopefully, we'll see some funding increase from
the state, and that will put less of a burden on municipal
governments as well as county governments."
Reporter Sara Leitch can be reached at 908-475-8184 or by
e-mail at sleitch@express-times.com.
© 2005 The Express-Times. Used with
permission.
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