UPDATED: County OKs Schools' $130.6M Budget, But Rejects Fields Plan

Editor's Note: This updated version includes comments from Board of Education President Susy Golderer.

The 2013-14 budget for Parsippany schools won county approval April 4, according to a statement on the district website.

The Board of Education cut the originally proposed spending plan by $1.5 million at its March 28 meeting, making the grand total for next year's budget $130,684,558.

The plan does not include expenditures for athletic improvements at the high school, which led to last-minute scrambling by board members, who had to come up with a final plan to send to Interim County Executive Superintendent Rosalie S. Lamonte on the 28th.

At the meeting, Parsippany Superintendent of Schools LeRoy Seitz surprised board members and residents alike when he announced that a plan formulated by a district ad hoc committee empaneled to address the fields situation had been rejected by Lamonte.

The committee decided on a plan March 16 to include $1.5 million in the budget to cover a new track for Parsippany High School track and a multipurpose turf field at Parsippany Hills High School. Seitz modified the preliminary budget in keeping with the committee's wishes.

When Seitz made his March 28 announcement of Lamonte's rejecting of a budget that included fields improvement expenses—before a packed house at Brooklawn Elementary School that included Fields of Dreams supporters, ad hoc committee members and student-athletes—shock reverberated throughout the room. About 30 people, mostly teenagers, stood and walked out of the gathering.

Fields supporters Michael Pietrowicz and Beth Bluj, who remained at the meeting, attributed the walkouts to "frustration." Both have worked for years for field improvements, citing poor conditions and the need to make facilities safer for students. 

Seitz explained that Lamonte refused to support any budget that included items from the failed Jan. 22 fields referendum—despite the fact that most improvements from the special election, among them, lights, bathrooms, bleacher upgrades and disability access, were not part of the plan.

The county superintendent's letter to the district said that her decision could be appealed.

"Before walking into closed session [which preceded the public meeting], I did not know that the county superintendent had rejected our budget that contained the PHHS field and the PHS track," said board member Fran Orthwein. "I do not know if any other board members were aware, but I do not think so. ... The majority of the board decided we would have to remove the items from the budget. Naturally, the ad hoc members and students were clearly disappointed, as was I, but it was not in our control."  

BOE President Susy Golderer confirmed that board members only became aware of Lamonte's decision right before the public meeting began.

That March 28 meeting continued on for more than five hours as BOE members grappled with a variety of options to reduce the budget. The original preliminary plan was set for $132.4 million, with a tax levy increase of 3.34 percent (allowable under state law because it utilized "banked cap," surplus funds that can be used without triggering the public vote usually called for when the tax hike exceeds 2 percent; with the inclusion of the fields items, the tax levy increase would have been 3.61 percent). But this night, Golderer and several other members stated that they wanted the budget reduced further, even after losing the fields improvements, to bring the tax levy down to 2 percent or less.

Much of the discussion between board members consisted of a back-and-forth on whether to go forward with the superintendent's plan to reinstate five media specialists cut from the budget several years ago after a substantial cut in state aid to Parsippany schools. 

Member Anthony Mancuso said the call for more budget cuts surprised him.

"Why after all the work the district did for the referendum, and all the work done by the ad hoc committee, did my fellow board members vote to cut [$1.5 million] funding out of the budget that would be needed if we appealed [Lamonte's decision]?" he asked. "How did they expect to keep the fields if they wanted this size of a cut?

"It was the board president who asked to have the fields included in the first place, so what would they have been willing to cut to keep the fields—reading and writing, as the president suggested? That does not make any sense to me. I could never have gone along with that. Just as I could not go along with ending any hope of an appeal."

President Golderer said she did favor including the fields, and after the improvements were excised from the budget at the county superintendent's behest, she believed an opportunity arose to investigate potential savings.

"We were already at a 3.34 tax increase when Dr. Seitz presented the tentative budget originally," she explained. "Then he took made about $1.5 million in cuts so he that could put the fields in. If he was able to cut that amount so that we could turn around and put the fields in, why couldn't he take those items out again when the fields were removed? That's what I was thinking."

Golderer also said the district will not appeal the county executive superintendent's decision.

"Absolutely we are not going to litigation on this," she asserted. "I understand [Lamonte's] logic: The taxpayers said no to the referendum. We don't know which part they said no to, so we have to assume the whole thing. You cannot then turn around and put in the same thing into your budget that your taxpayers said they didn't want. Whether we like it or not, it made sense. The taxpayers said no, and since we only had one question, we didn't know if they said no to the bathrooms or the lights or the stands. If we had stuck to the simple tracks and fields and put together a business plan and solicited donations for the rest, we might have done better." 

Golderer said residents should be assured that the board will continue to work to move a fields plan forward.

Vice President Sharif Shamsudin was not available for comment. The remaining board members were asked for comment on the March 28 discussions, but did not respond.

By the end of the meeting, the board voted to adopted the 2013-2014 budget with the following cuts totalling $1.5 million, along with another approximate $400,000 in reductions to be determined by Seitz:

• Reduce Health Insurance Premium - $200,000
• Reduce School Resource Officers from Three to One - $160,000
• Eliminate Two Buses - $175,000
• Eliminate Emergency Generator - $372,500
• Reduce One Teaching Position - $75,000
• Reduce Supplies by 5 percent - $83,000
• Move Equipment to Lease Purchase - $149,025
• Increase Appropriate Fund Balance - $285,475

Golderer said residents should be aware that the $75,000 teaching position reduction does not put someone out of work. She said that cut will come from any high school class that needs to be dropped because of lack of enrollment.

Mancuso said he did not understand the move to leave Seitz the responsibility of finding $400,000 in other items to excise from the budget.

"I have been part of failed budgets and I respect that making those cuts are not easy, but they are the responsibility that comes with being elected to this position," he said. "The board president said that she did not trust the superintendent and had no confidence in the budget, so why would she then hand it to him to cut? That just does not make sense to me. 

"I can not understand how some board members would just turn their backs on that responsibility and hand it to the outgoing superintendent; we should have had our finance committee work with him to find the cuts [in] a joint effort," Mancuso continued. "Choosing not to be part of making the tough choices seems irresponsible to me."

Golderer agreed that she had no confidence in the budget numbers, but she said the seeds for that mistrust had been sown during past fiscal discussions. 

"I don't have confidence in [Seitz's] numbers," she said. "I remember the situation with the paraprofessionals last year. We had not budgeted for $800,000 in retroactive pay for the paras and I wondered how we were going find that kind of money. All of a sudden, we were able to come up with the $800,000 through other line items. Then in the next year, he put those items back into the [preliminary] budget.

"If that year you had $100,000 in line items on paper and took out $60,000 for paraprofessionals, I have to assume you made do with the remaining $40,000. So why in the following year are we allocating $100,000 again and not $40,000?" she asked. "No, I don't have confidence in the integrity of his numbers." 

She took issue with the notion that she turned her back on the process by charging Seitz with finding another $400,000 in reductions and in the end, those additional cuts did not materialize. The $1.5 million in cuts chosen March 28 were the final ones instituted, making the tax levy hike not the 2 percent Golderer and other members said they wanted, but 2.41 percent.

The 2013-14 budget approved by Lamonte April 4 includes the aforementioned reductions but keeps all existing instructional and co-curricular programs, maintains current class size at all levels and reinstates all five elementary media specialists.