Budget Talk: A Long Night With No Answers

Longtime Central Regional Board of Education member Denise Pavone-Wilson could not sit still.

She paced almost continuously after officials from the five towns in the Central Regional school district went into closed session to discuss the defeated school budget.

"I just got a number and that's why I'm stressed," she told Central Regional Education Association President Susan Hopson. "It's not good."

Pretty soon after that, Hopson was pacing herself.

"It's terrible," she said. "There's so much at stake. We are so desperately poor here. We are on a shoestring as it is. We are at the bare minimum We do the most with what we have. It's really going to hurt the kids."

The budget as it stands now calls for the elimination of 10 teaching positions - including four foreign language teachers - primarily through attrition. Freshman sports, with the exception of football and girls lacrosse, had already been eliminated.

When asked what the mood was among Central Regional Education members, Hopson had one word - fear.

 "There's a lot of tension," she said. "Everybody's worried."

And the roughly 110 people who showed up at the meeting Monday night left with no answers. After more than three hours of negotiations, Seaside Park officials had budged from their $1.5 million in suggested cuts to a lower number that was not released.

"Right now, the number is too high," Berkeley Township Mayor Jason J. Varano said after the meeting.

The Berkeley Township Council will probably certify either zero or a "minimal" amount of cuts at tonight's council meeting, he said.

Central Regional Board President Keith Buscio came out at 7:50 p.m. Monday night to announce that officials were still negotiating.

"It's really a long, drawn-out, stressful, annoying, draining, exhausting process," Buscio told the waiting audience. "I'd equate it with if you went to the dentist, with no Novocain."

Seaside Park officials had initially suggested a $3 million cut in the budget at a previous meeting earlier this month, but later pared it to $1.5 million at the same meeting.

Seaside Park officials hired a consultant since the previous meeting to go over the budget. They presented officials from Berkeley Township, Ocean Gate, Island Heights and Seaside Heights with 15 items they listed for potential cuts, Buscio said.

"Please bear with us," he said. "We appreciate your patience. It's possible we may not have any resolution this evening."

Although voters in Island Heights, Seaside Heights and Ocean Gate approved the $27,489,152 tax levy portion of the Central Regional $33,252,531 budget on April 27, it went down in Berkeley Township and Seaside Park. The total vote was 2,485 to 2,379 - a .

Officials from Berkeley Township, including Varano, Township Council President Karen Davis, Council Vice President Carmen J. Amato Jr. and Councilman Nathan Abbe;  Ocean Gate Mayor Paul Kennedy, Seaside Heights Business Administrator John Camera and Seaside Park Business Administrator Robert Martucci attended the meeting.

Martucci was the only Seaside Park official who actually sat in the meeting room during the public session. The chairs of other Seaside Park officials were empty.

"This budget unfortunately has nothing to do with the kids and the school," Hopson said as she waited. "They (Seaside Park officials) are upset over the funding formula."

The budget situation is complicated by the ongoing litigation between the two school districts and the Township Council over just where Seaside Park students should attend school. Nine Seaside Park students have been attending Toms River Regional Schools free of charge, under an agreement arranged by former Toms River Regional schools superintendent Michael J. Ritacco.

But a new Board of Education earlier this month . From now on, tuition for Seaside Park students to attend Toms River Schools could top $10,000 for the upcoming school year.

A mathematics teacher who asked not to be identified thumbed through a battered Algebra II book during the wait last night. The defeated budget had a $100,000 line item to replace Central regional math books - most of which are more than a decade old.

"The first student to use this book is now almost 30 years old," she said.

The book's binding was torn and the book's cover was hanging by a shred of paper to the rest of the book.

"They are not all this bad," the teacher said. "But this is representative of a number of them. Would Seaside Park consider this an expendable item?"

School taxes on a home in Berkeley Township assessed at the township average of $201,400 would have risen $0.94 cents per month. Seaside Park residents with a home assessed at the borough average of $558,160 would have seen the largest increase, at $20.65 per month. While property assessments went down in four of the towns, Seaside Park assessments rose 3 percent, Central Regional Superintendent Triantafillos "Tom" Parlapanides said during his presentation.

The budget approval would have meant a hike of $18.74 a month for an Island Heights home assessed at the borough average of $388,981, primarily because of an influx of 15 additional students into the Central Regional school system.

Seaside Heights would have seen the only decrease — 78 cents per month on a home assessed at the borough average of $302,035. Ocean Gate property owners with an average assessed home value of $242,300 would pay an extra $3.13 per month.