School District To Save Extra State Aid For Future

When the state announced last week that the Fort Lee School District would be getting an additional $565,959 for 2011-2012 on top of the $951,643 Gov. Chris Christie said it would receive in February, local school officials said they had yet to receive “firm guidance” on use of the additional funds.

On Monday, Fort Lee Board of Education president Arthur Levine said there are no restrictions that he or school board vice president Linda McCue are aware of.

“As far as I know it’s unencumbered,” Levine said. “It’s just additional funding with no strings attached.”

But that doesn’t mean the school district plans to hire or re-hire any additional employees or use the money for property tax relief. Instead, Levine and McCue indicated the district would rather save the money in anticipation of leaner times ahead.

“People are asking us whether you’re going to hire more people; No,” Levine said. “We don’t know what’s going to happen next year so some of those funds very well could be used to be banked—if you will—to cover our deficit, which we know we’re going to have next year.”

McCue noted that the additional funding could easily turn out to be a one-time deal, and that a more careful approach to using the funds is therefore in order.

“The problem with employees is it could be a lifetime,” she said. “People say with that money you could bring back a certain employee. But next year, we could lose that plus another half-a-million, so that’s why I think we’re a little cautious.”

With the additional aid, Fort Lee is receiving a total of  $1,517,602 from the state, or $1,131,919 more than it got in 2010-11, when the total was just $385,683. But the approximately $1.5 million total is still significantly less than the roughly $3.2 million Fort Lee received from the state as recently as 2009-2010.

“You’re talking a half a million,” McCue said the extra money announced last week. “Everyone thinks it sounds like a lot of money, but we’re not catching up.”

The BOE has not met since the governor made the announcement; the board’s next meeting is Monday. Levine said there is also a finance committee meeting coming up at which committee members will presumably discuss the issue. But for now, no firm decisions have been made.

“We’re not just mindful of this year, but the following years and what we know is coming down the line,” Levine said.

NJ Spotlight reported Monday that the Christie administration issued a memo late last week encouraging school districts to use the additional money for property tax relief. The memo also indicated that districts would have to make a decision by Tuesday if they intended to add the extra money to next year's tax levy. But the article also points out that doing that would have required school boards to provide a 48-hour notice and meet before making such a decision, which means notice would have had to go out by the end of last week.

The DailyRecord.com also reported Monday that the DOE agreed to allow at least some districts in Morris County to take more time to figure out what to do with the extra money—the deadline was originally 4 p.m. Tuesday—provided municipal and county tax board officials agreed.

But Levine said tax relief was not a consideration for Fort Lee.

“That was never our intent,” Levine said Tuesday in response to the NJ Spotlight report.