Safety and Security

In a previous post, I wrote about how the Hillsborough Township school district - through necessary budget cuts - has been left with a lack of adequate supervision in some critical areas. In a future post, I will have some suggestions to remedy that. Today, let's focus on the essential area of safety and security.

When I say "safety and security" I am not talking about security guards, school resource officers (SROs), or arming teachers. In the context of supervision, I am suggesting adding a new position of Director of Safety and Security. This would be a management position reporting directly to the superintendent.

In Hillsborough, many or most of the functions you might associate with this type of position have fallen under the responsibility of the school business administrator (BA). If you are a Hillsborough resident reading this right now you don't have to think too hard to understand why this might not be the best arrangement. But when I first began suggesting adding this position years ago it was simply to take some responsibility away from the BA and put it into the hands of a security professional.

A Director of Safety and Security would be responsible for:

• Interfacing with local and state law enforcement.
• Assessing the safety and security of each building.
• Being in charge of loss prevention.
• Arranging for security at events.
• Consulting on weather-related or other school closings.
• Being present!

That is just a short list - a security professional coming to the district would surely know more about the job than I do! Having said that, let's take a closer look at the bullet points I noted above.

Local law enforcement is very involved with our schools. That is a good thing. But it takes a lot of time away from our educational leader - the superintendent - and our business professional - the BA. In my experience, these two school leaders don't always know the right questions to ask law enforcement and don't necessarily know how to explain the district's needs. A security director would take care of that.

In my fifteen-plus years as a school board member, we had a couple of different security assessments done in the district - but I don't remember implementing many of the suggestions until the 2019 building referendum when it was decided to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars at each school to add security vestibules. It would be my expectation that a security director would have more "ounce of prevention" suggestions.

Loss prevention - this one is a biggie. I am not talking about someone walking off with office supplies - they don't do that anyway. What I am talking about is eyes-on accountability with access that board members just don't have. Purchasing, overtime, expense reports - all of it. Enough said.

Event security - including at board meetings - has become more necessary as civil society has continued to break down. I want someone who knows what is needed and when police need to be called.

School closings for weather or other issues - on the eve of our first, thankfully minor, delayed opening tomorrow morning this one speaks for itself.

And finally - Being Present. Despite what you might think, it's not in a human being's nature to be "good"!

Supervision

Hillsborough taxpayers who join in on the common refrain "we need to cut administration" might be surprised to learn that there is nothing left to cut.

Hillsborough was an administratively lean district when I was elected to the board in 2007 and became leaner through successive belt tightenings each year - and for better or worse I contributed to that. In the previous post, I described how the district was perpetually underfunded in state aid beginning in 2008 and continuing for nearly a decade. While other districts were funded adequately or even overfunded and were able to build surpluses in cash, personnel, or sometimes both, Hillsborough was forced to cut.

During those years I fought to preserve the most needed programs, especially special education - but the one thing that I insisted upon was that teaching staff cuts were only made if they were in proportion to cuts in administration.

In the beginning, it wasn't too difficult. The district was transitioning from a model where we had subject-area supervisors at the high school level and also district-wide supervisors in those same areas - with potential duplication of duties - to a district-wide-only model. As high school-level supervisors retired savings were achieved through attrition.

Then it became harder. Facing budget shortfalls, superintendents came to the board with recommendations to combine responsibilities, have the high school vice principals pick up some duties, and eliminate positions outright. For example - the supervisor of Visual & Performing Arts and Related Areas - besides those named areas - also covers Applied Technology, Business, and Family & Consumer Sciences. And don't bother asking the name of the Nursing Supervisor or Health & Physical Education Supervisor because there is none.

In the next post, I will outline my proposal to fix this unsustainable state of affairs and suggest at least one other position to be created. After that, we will get into the cuts!

State Aid

New Jersey school districts fund their programs with three basic sources of revenue - local property taxes, federal aid, and state aid. Much has been written about the successes and failures of the 2008 state aid funding formula. An interesting source is @stateaidguy whose Facebook Page can be found here at New Jersey Education Aid.

The School Funding Reform Act of 2008 (SFRA) is based on a pretty good concept. School districts should fund their budgets with local property taxes up to their ability to pay those taxes. In a nutshell, that number is called "Local Fair Share". If property taxes fell short of another concept called "adequacy" - the amount of money the state says a school district of a certain size needs to operate - then the balance would be made up by state taxpayers as state aid.

When people talk about a state aid "calculation" what they really mean is Local Fair Share calculation. Local Fair Share is based on the "wealth" of a district. Wealth is determined by two factors - the total property value of the municipality and the incomes of the residents. 

All else being equal this plan could work. But, of course, it's not.

Right from the start the thirty-one so-called Abbott Districts were more or less exempt from the calculations. Somewhere around 55% of all the state aid money went to these districts while the other 570-plus districts split up what was left. Because New Jersey does not have an unlimited supply of money, many of those 570 or so districts were chronically underfunded in state aid. Can you guess who that included?

During my first decade or so on Hillsborough's school board, I reported each March that our school district was underfunded in state aid. Five million, six million, seven million - it was always the same. The truth was, and is, that Hillsborough does not have a lot of high tax rateables in town and there is an inordinate burden on homeowners to pay that local fair share. At least we could take comfort in the fact that the state recognized this - even while at the same time telling us "too bad, there's none left for you". In order to try to reach adequacy, Hillsborough was compelled to raise taxes up to the state limit of 2% each year and to take waivers when possible to pay for outsized increases in health insurance premiums. But it was not sustainable.

The effect of this over the course of five or six or seven years was that while other districts that received full funding or were indeed overfunded were able to increase their program offerings and teaching staffs, and build surpluses all Hillsborough could do was cut.

Then in the late 2010s, something miraculous happened. According to the state, Hillsborough became wealthy. No longer was Hillsborough underfunded each year by millions of dollars, now we were OVERFUNDED! And, oh yeah, we would have to pay that back!!!!

Other districts that were told to "pay it back" were able to do so out of surplus - either in actual dollars or by eliminating surplus positions that were added when they were flush with cash. All Hillsborough could do was keep cutting. And this is the position Hillsborough is in today.

In future posts, I will provide my own solutions for this mess and my recommendations for this year's budget.