our benefits uh out of District cost Transportation there's just a lot of things so trying to get these things in balance is certainly going to be a challenge we're going to do the very best we can we'll be working with all of our administrative team members to try to determine how we can best address both our needs you know and the loss of the revenue and be able to present to the board a tenant to budget for them to approve I do want to say even to the board it may take us even longer than a couple weeks uh we will have a tenant to budget it'll be a balance budget but it still may need some tweaking we are permitted the time period between the time the board approves a tenant to budget which will be within the next couple weeks and the public hearing public hearing is when we have an opportunity to make the final adjustments we may just need a little bit more time to kind of fine-tune some things but hopefully within the next couple weeks we can kind of handle a majority of the adjustments that need to be made in order to get our budget in Balance so that is where we are any questions from thank you I'm just gonna add a couple of pieces of information about the funding formula so we talk a lot about legislative advocacy so I wanted to each individual School District receives their state aid summary and it includes the calculations for their local fair share so those numbers when you you look on like nj.com or the doe website you don't see the calculations that were used for each municipality last year I Opa requested those numbers for the entire State and I did so again this year I just have not received that information so that I can do a comparison to what other District's um Equalization valuation and District income factors were in the calculation for local fair share because I want to understand what what it looks like for us and if it's comparable to other communities throughout the state so from a local fair share perspective the way that our budget works is we have our adequacy budget it's based on our enrollment we talk a lot about S2 which is based on our enrollment as well from my perspective however it almost appears and I can't think of a better analogy I kind of racked my brain a few minutes ago to come up with one as if somebody is putting their finger on the scale because when our local fair share increases when they allocate when they say our Municipal tax burden should be this number the state a decreases because it's subtracted from our adequacy budget so this is the cost the state says that you need your adequacy budget to educate students provide a thorough and fair education efficient thorough and efficient thanks I was like there was definitely the wrong adjective there that's our adequacy budget then they subtract your your local fair share what your Municipal Taxes should raise your property taxes and then the remaining amount is your Equalization Aid that's given to you from the state so that number is is what we're looking at when we talk about our state aid numbers because there's all these special categories that we receive other buckets from however the state when we're looking at how they're doing the math on that local fair share formula is what is concerning to us and what we will continue to advocate for because that is where we see kind of the flaw in the formula so to give you an example and I and I tried to Crunch the numbers Pitman has 3,26 properties on our sr3 a for the count from the county so of those 3,26 properties the state on our funding formula has said in one year from fiscal year 24 to fiscal year 25 we saw an increased value on those properties of $15 million which is a substantial amount of money for our property values to have been raised so I don't know if you've all refi your homes to cash in on that but it is there the the from fiscal year 23 to 24 Equalization valuation increased 16.66% which was $112 Million so again that's the prior year so our Equalization value from fiscal year 23 to fiscal year 25 has increased by over 40% so they have decided that the valuation in Pitman and our real estate holdings have increased in value by 40% additionally and I'm not sure if you have seen this reflected in your paychecks the district income the wealth of our district from fiscal year 24 to 25 increased 11.4% or 37 million so the residents in our community saw that increase in their District income those two numbers are then multiplied by a multiplier that changes every single year and that number calculates what they believe our Municipal tax burden should be so that they can then allocate what their portion of Equalization Aid that we're owed to so the funding formula when they've run that number so this year for example we saw an 11% increase or 1,499 80 difference that they increased our Municipal tax burden so they have now said this is the increased amount of taxes that we believe your community has both the wealth and the real estate holdings to be receiving from your residents from fiscal year 22 to 25 we saw a 29% increase which is 3347490025 I apologize so over $3 million and if we make that a cumulative loss and we add those four years together in the number that was loss between each year we arrive at over $5 million that the state has increased our Municipal tax burden which in turn allows them to decrease the amount of Equalization Aid that we are owed from an equalization Aid perspective we have seen a total loss of over $7 million because over those corresponding years the equalization Aid that we are entitled to has decreased because our Municipal tax has has taken a bigger portion of that so if that's a scale and the and this is adequacy as our Municipal tax base goes up their portion of Aid that we are owed goes down so that from my perspective as a taxpayer and Resident is what is most alarming to me because as concerning as S2 was and our declining enrollment and you know we've looked at these other districts in the state that have faced that as well ultimately this appears to be a large if not you know most significant driving factor in the funding formula in terms of what has changed our our Aid that we're in receipt from the state as a board it's obviously something that we've identified if as an area of concern um I mentioned I believe last meeting that I had I'm not sure if we've had a meeting since then I that I had spoken to Senator BR Chelly regarding um our concern we were waiting for our C numbers to come out this afternoon we sent emails on behalf of the board to um the Senate education committee the assembly education committee we reached out to our njsba government relations rep um Jonathan pushman as well as Dr Pernell we also included the uh legislative aid for the assembly and then I registered to um attend the public hearing and potentially provide testimony at both the assembly and the Senate i' welcome anyone who'd like to join me we can certainly carpool but I think that this is the the concern when you're looking at it from a big picture perspective um as to what absolutely needs to change in the funding formula and is is really shorting districts particularly subing districts like ours so it it's really it's really just an unfair equation and this isn't what the school funding Reform Act was in intended to do it's just that they can't meet the budgetary obligations of the system they've created and so they're changing the rules so that that's kind of my position as board member I know we talk a lot about it um and I would welcome any board members that want to join me and if you have any thoughts um please shoot me an email and same same goes for members of the public because it's it's a concern and I hope that we see some movement much like we did last year after the budget release that will go in our Direction when is the hearing the 11th of March and the 19th so the assembl is the 11th and the 19th for the Senate anyone else all right that is going to bring us we have no meeting minutes I apologize let me just pop back to the agenda um we have no data at hoc finance and Facilities Mr Gman if you'd like to touch briefly upon yeah just a say that the financial facili committing April Miss Miller myself and Sarah Bolton met at Sarah's house Friday evening up two hours just to discuss the uh referendum uh projects and try to get that into a budget of what we can go out for versus the cost of doing every project we have to cut projects down to get within budget of what we can't afford on referendum so we did some preliminary discussions on that and then of course our our executive session ton was more clarity with our Engineers Architects okay thank you that close my report thank you curriculum instruction Mrs frell can I turn it over oh do you want me to take it okay do you have it do you want to take it okay I'm gonna move items one through five as written any discussion oh may I have a may I have a second thank you sorry not used to doing this job that's okay all right any discussion I'll just comment uh first of all I'd like to comment on number five uh the opportunity to appoint Mr Rob Miles as our new business administrator repl Mr Rose we certainly hate to see her leave but we're very fortunate to find someone who has experience there's a very limited pool of individuals who are applying for these positions uh Rob is currently serving as a school business administrator looking to get a little bit closer to home and looking for the opportunity to work in the Pitman Community uh the other person there at number four war is another important and this is one of our long-term Replacements but these individuals play a very very important role in maintaining the qualities that we're looking for and I think this is another one and I've probably said this for the last couple meetings that we've been very very fortunate especially with our permanent Replacements but even with some of our Temporaries and this is a young lady who is currently finishing up a replacement position in another District uh she has just completed her coursework a few months ago to be a school counsel very young very Dynamic uh she will be replacing um Dr Davidson who will be out on a temporary leave so again just very fortunate to get a high quality individual even though it's going to be for a very short period of time and then KY there is being recommended as one of our PA of professionals again someone who is um very knowledgeable of our district looking to get into this world of preschool education and also going to be an asset of course we see going to certain hate to see Mark Le us uh we always uh wish our employees here that are moving on the best and we certainly wish Mark the best and Mark's only been here a very short time a little over a year but has done a great job for us and uh it's going to be surely Miss so we'll be working hard to to fill that position as as quickly as we can that's it thank you Mrs Rose please call the voteo yes Bolton yes Farrell yes P alardo yes po yes cman yes Meer yes motion pass okay that's going to bring us to our second public comment if you'd like to be recognized to speak please step to the podium to my left state your name Municipality of residents and group affiliation of applicable hi Greg Pon address okay um just trying to get the number straight for the budget issues we lost one and a halfish last year and got $900,000 back from the state after they kind of reconfigured a little bit but that was just a onee grant back to us one year legislative action yes so we're potentially losing from our budget $1.6 million this year from what we had last year you're putting those two things kind of together yeah so like $900,000 plus another $700,000 just the say roughly it's probably a little bit less that $900,000 we probably spent maybe let's say 500 and so on onetime Personnel cost and when you use Personnel you we' like to see Personnel in the regular budget not in the one time so yes we need to replace that money so kind of in theory yes I think you can kind of put it right around that number is I mean the hope is we can get some of these $700,000 back through another legislative action best case scenario we could get some of that money back but the $900,000 is probably no chance at this point no that's absolutely right it was onetime funding only there's no chance and and I would even go as far as saying even if we got partial or all the seven it it does it's a it's a really really nice Band-Aid but that's all it is is a Band-Aid and we really need to work and we are going to do the very best we can to kind of fix the best we can the issue so that moving forward out of S2 when when we move forward we're starting at 11 playing field we're not putting and starting the year already another $500,000 in the hole because we didn't fix the problem it's not going to be easy I would say that your 1.5 it's probably even maybe a couple hundred thousand dollar more than that is is the number that we're probably looking at is having to make a reduction in order to get a balanced budget last year we as we all know we had the option of and unfortunately had to close the two schools schools don't have that option this year so it's going to be a little bit more challenging but we're going to do the very best we can to kind of get us to a point where we can then start to build back up as hopefully in the future years we start to re we start to be on the positive side of receiving state aid are we able to talk yet about what kinds of cuts we might be making or is that just just got the numbers on Thursday and as I said you got to digested a little bit so we're in the very very very early stages um but it's only going to be a challenge right thank you thank you see no one did we make a decision we are not meeting next week correct we just our regular scheduled meeting okay all right anybody have any old or new business seeing none may I have a motion to close so toour may I have a second second bolon all in favor next Pitman Board of Education meeting will be on Wednesday March 20th 2024 in the Pitman Junior Senior High Media Center thank you