Hopatcong School Programs, Staff Could Be Cut

Hopatcong schools will have to cut staff or programs if the state doesn't restore some of the from the district's 2012-2013 state aid, Board of Education President Cliff Lundin said.

"I don't want to cut people and I don't want to cut programs," he said at Monday night's school board meeting. "But something is going to happen."

The warning came five days after the state Department of Education announced Hopatcong would receive $11,102,061—or $764,329 less—state aid in 2012 than it did in 2011, when it got $11,866,390, despite Gov. Chris Christie's pledge to give New Jersey public schools $200 million more.

Hopatcong's preliminary budget proposal, which must be submitted to the state by Monday, is about $500,000 over the 2-percent cap, Business Administrator Theresa Sierchio said. The school board will hold an emergency budget meeting 7:45 a.m. Thursday morning at the . Hopatcong administrators planned to meet Tuesday morning to outline potential cuts, Sierchio said.

"We don't matter. We don't really matter in Trenton. And they don't really care because we're not a big Abbott district," Sierchio said, referring to poorer state schools that receive more funding. "We're not a big city.

"We keep on getting penalized for doing more with less and working as hard as we do. It really is devastating."

The biggest reason Hopatcong lost state aid, Sierchio said, was because the state factored attendance and enrollment into its funding formula. The state's average attendance is 96 percent while Hopatcong's is 94.6 percent. And the district's enrollment has dropped about 500 students over the last five years, Sierchio said.

Cutting staff and programs isn't new to Hopatcong.

The district and cut a slew of classes and programs, including freshman sports, after Christie cut $1.7 million from its state aid as part of a nearly $1 billion statewide aid cut in 2010. The borough also reduced the district's budget $730,000 after it the public voted down its initial proposal.

Hopatcong didn't make cuts in 2011, however, despite taking another budget defeat—its eighth straight—before the borough cut $225,000 from its initial budget proposal.

To make matters worse, Sierchio said, she was worried the district's state aid would shrink to about $8 million over the next few years.

"One particular concern is that it's going to be a phase-in, and over the next five years, [the district] will go from $12 million in aid (in 2009-2010) to $8 million in aid," she said.

School board member Richard Lavery said state aid could shrink "anywhere from $900,000 to $1.1 million a year over the next four years, every year.

"While all of our costs will be increasing," Sierchio said, "our deficit costs will be increasing significantly."

While the state said Hopatcong would get about a three-quarter-million dollars less state aid in 2012-2013 than in 2011-2012, Sierchio said the amount of overall aid could actually be more.

Though Hopatcong held over about $340,000 in state aid it received in July for the 2012-2013 budget, it expects to lose the $427,058 in federal aid from the Education Jobs Bill it used in 2011-2012, Sierchio said. That would bring the total aid loss—both state and federal—to about more than $800,000, Sierchio said.

The school board also passed a resolution to petition state and local government leaders to reject Christie's budget.

"Further reductions will have a devastating impact [on providing] thorough and efficient education required under the New Jersey constitution," Lundin said.

What do you think about the possibility of the district making staff or program cuts? Tell us in the comments.