Full-Day Kindergarten Funding Back in Budget?

The Board of Education is expecting to hear a recommendation Monday night to use $777,000 of received when the governor two weeks ago disbursed extra school aid statewide to restore, pick up the costs of needed facilities repairs and scrap a pay-to-play plan for high school activities.

If the board uses about $300,000 to fully fund kindergarten, the district will not need to tapwith money raised early this year by the Bernards Township Public School Initiative to prevent kindergarten from being cut to a part-day program.

The school board meeting is scheduled to be held at the  office on Peachtree Road at 7 p.m. The school district's website says the board will consider a vote to fully fund the kindergarten program and to repeal the previously planned fee for student activities. 

Board President Susan Carlsson on Sunday said that if the crowd is too large to be accomodated at the board office, the meeting can be moved next door to the .

Carlsson previously said that of the remaining amount, about $70,000 would be used to avoid charging a student activities fee at Ridge High School, and the remainder could be used for repairs and renovations at school facilities that she said are high priority.

The school board's finance subcommittee discussed the recommendations last Wednesday night. The school district did not take the option, as urged by Gov. Chris Christie of using the extra school funding announced in mid-July to reduce the school tax rate for 2011-12.

Carlsson previously said the board's decision to cut full-day kindergarten last November was one of the cost-saving measures for the 2011-12 school year. She said that decision, along with initially cutting the school day at Ridge High School from nine to eight periods, was made on the basis of the reduction of state aid from more than $3 million in 2009-10 to less than $900,000 for 2010-11.

"Nobody wanted to make that cut," Carlsson said of the decision to reduce full-day kindergarten. But she said the board was trying at that time to plan its next school year programs based on aid figures available at the time.

The state then announced in March that it would increase the amount of aid to Bernards Township schools to about $1.6 million, which allowed the school board to reverse the decision regarding the school day at Ridge High School, and to restore the nine-period day.

Carlsson also defended what she said will be her recommendation to use the added $770,000 in funding, which is on top of the $1.6 million in aid announced this spring, for other expenses within the district.

She said school funding still is down from more than $3 million in 2009-10 and from about $4 million the previous year. She also said the district does not know what state aid levels will be for the following year.

"We're very happy," parent Adam Hecht said on hearing news that the board finance committee would recommend funding full-day kindergarten again in this year's budget. Hecht and his wife, Janina, had spearheaded a community effort to raise more than $450,000 from about 450 donors to keep the full-day program from being reduced to a part-time day this September and in future years.

Hecht said The Bernards Township Public School Initiative already has a mechanism set up for returning the money, preserved in a special fund. Late last week, he said the group had not yet discussed the ramifications of what to do with funds set aside for funding of full-day kindergarten in future school years.

Even with Christie's announcement that additional funding would go to school district's statewide, Hecht said he believes the parents had still saved full-day kindergarten in the district.

"What we were all about was creating a bridge between the time when we weren't adequately funded to the time when we would have the funds," Hecht said on Thursday morning.

Hecht said that even if the school district had wanted to use part of the extra state funds that the governor had on July 13 announced would be distributed, it might have been too late, since teachers would have been laid off, a new curriculum would have been written for the part-day kindergarten program and a contract likely would have been arranged for an extension of the school that was being discussed last year with the 

Carlsson agreed it might have been too late to turn back the reduction of the kindergarten day by July. Teachers would have been "riffed" and might not have been available to return to their regular classrooms by this point, she said.

Hecht said he received an email from School Superintendent Valerie Goger that called the parents and community "awesome" for rallying to save full-day kindergarten.