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Re: Possible relief on the way?
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Home away from home
 
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There's a large body of studies showing extracurricular activities like sports and arts are of great importance for building adult skills and motivating students. Our district dramatically underfunds everything but labor, which it pays in the 98th percentile of NJ equivalent districts. Why is that? Not JC but our County: why did High Tech get a new school when their previous one looked brand new by JC standards? I'm guessing it was "Use it or lose it".
Posted on: 2019/5/2 22:32
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Re: Possible relief on the way?
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Home away from home
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The "labor" i.e. the teachers are the main benefit the students get from schools.
Posted on: 2019/5/2 21:18
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Re: Possible relief on the way?
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Home away from home
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brewster, you're arguing with a lawyer, and a shill of the city at that. The rest of us agree with you.
Posted on: 2019/5/2 20:31
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Re: Possible relief on the way?
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Home away from home
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Do you even hear how weak a defense this sounds like? One year of deferred raises is not going to solve our problems, nor is even raising taxes to make up the shortfall. We need to get a grip on the spending. We have a culture of giving public servants whatever they want for political support and keeping the peace during elections. I'd love to get ahold of an actual datafile of state school budgets and line by line compare ours to a comparably spending suburban district. Do you think I'd be wrong to guess that we spend far more on labor and far less on the students? I have the state downloadeable TGES excel files, but they're obtuse to the point of deliberate obfuscation, and will take quite some time to decipher.
Posted on: 2019/5/2 18:46
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Home away from home
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The board is not "controlled" by the teachers. Although the union endorsed candidates have won in recent elections after years of "Parents for Progress" candidates, they exercise their independent judgment. Significantly more so than the board members who repeatedly failed to address issues and instead muttered "I support Dr. Lyles" as a mantra. Last year the board closed a $71 million shortfall. This year the board has negotiated a contract which has no raises in the first year and contains significant concessions on matters such as extra work. It is a more responsible agreement than those that were negotiated under Dr. Lyles. The board is ahead of the Star-Ledger editors on health care costs. The Star-Ledger suggests merging the state school employees health care fund with the state employees health care fund. Jersey City, however, is not in the state school employees health care fund. They exited last year, to the great consternation of the union, and have saved millions of dollars. The district squandered its reserve fund with Lyles at the helm, without oversight. It was not "union controlled" board members that allowed this to happen.
Posted on: 2019/5/2 13:57
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Home away from home
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All true, especially the out of control spending. A board controlled by the teachers cannot be expected to bargain in good faith for the citizens. What we have now is a system run for the benefit of it's employees not the students. Classes are being cut, all activities are being cut, anything that can be tossed overboard is now on the block except golden union contracts that pay better than 98% of their peers in the state. I just wasted some time calculating the labor proportion of this budget: 87%. That's $478,040,1430 of the $615,867,852 budget, not counting the $67,999,857 for charters. To solve this crisis we need assess where our money is going not just where it comes from. For my source, see pp 44-45 of http://www.jcboe.org/boe2015/images/p ... et-SY2018-19_03.28.18.pdf
Posted on: 2019/5/2 1:19
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Home away from home
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Exactly!!!
Posted on: 2019/5/2 0:40
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Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees. The city (and, BOE) have decided to undertax JC citizens, and then turn around and claim poverty. We have one of the lowest tax rates in the State. The state average tax rate is 50% higher than ours. Perhaps we wouldn't be so desperate if there was an honest attempt to fund OUR local schools. But, as with everything in life, why make the hard choices when someone is willing to bail us out? The truth is that the local BOE never felt the need to be fiscally judicious, because someone else was covering the bills, so they failed to levy the proper taxes, and after years of graft, corruption, fiscal mismanagement, and out of control spending, the chickens have come home to roost. It is chutzpah, plain and simple, for the BOE to claim poverty now. No different than the joke about the guy who kills his parents but then pleads for leniency at sentencing by exclaiming "take pity on me, I am an orphan." This mess is of their own doing.
Posted on: 2019/5/2 0:03
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Home away from home
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It seems that you're quibble is that you never liked the Abbott decision and the obligations that the State had under it.
In terms of the lifting of the cap, that is all well and good now but it doesn't change the fact that the district's contribution was hamstrung until now. So to blame the city for the district's inability to raise the cap in the past makes no sense.
Posted on: 2019/5/1 23:52
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Just can't stay away
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2015/10/21 0:40 Last Login : 2019/5/15 18:48 From One of the Oranges
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S2 eliminated the tax cap for Abbott districts who are under Adequacy and that have taxes below Local Fair Share. "(3) In the case of an SDA district, as defined puruant to section 3 of P.L.2000, C.72 (C.18A:7G-3), in which the prebudget year adjusted tax levy is less than the school district's prebudget year local share as calculated pursuant to section 10 of P.L.2007, C.260 (C.18A:7F-52), the allowable adjustment for increases to raise a tax levy that does not exceed the school district's local share shall equal the difference between the prebudget year adjusted tax levy and the prebudget year local share." https://www.njleg.state.nj.us/2018/Bills/PL18/67_.PDF Also, the JCBOE case makes much of municipal overburden, but JC's tax rate is only 1.6%, versus a state average of 2.4%. The JCBOE will never be able to claim that a 1.6% tax rate is onerous because it isn't. The case is groundless.
Posted on: 2019/5/1 20:22
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Towns can ask for cap rises over 2%, and no city (including JC) was forced to give PILOTS at all, especially in non distressed areas like the JC waterfront.
Posted on: 2019/5/1 19:41
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Home away from home
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Based on prior constitutional mandates and court decisions, the BOE is correct.
And it was state law that a) imposed a property tax cap and b) required all PILOT payments to be made to municipalities. So don't blame the district for underfunding.
Posted on: 2019/5/1 19:19
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Home away from home
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JC schools have been playing with house money for decades, and given that it is Jersey City we can only imagine the graft and waste. Now that JC taxpayers will have more skin in the game, will they demand reform and transparency?
Posted on: 2019/5/1 19:11
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Home away from home
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"... It would lead to further overcrowding of our classrooms, which are already crowded because of underfunding over years."
Talk about chutzpah: the state covers almost 80% of our local BOE budget and yet its president claims the state is underfunding it.
Posted on: 2019/5/1 17:45
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Possible relief on the way?
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Home away from home
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Posted on: 2019/5/1 17:18
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