Subcommittee to Ask Aid Go to Full-Day Kindergarten

The school board's finance subcommittee is set to recommend to the full Board of Education on Monday that part of an be used to to again pay the cost of full-day kindergarten for the coming school year instead of using community-donated funds.

School Board President Susan Carlsson, also a member of the board's finance committee, said the recommendation will be made at the meeting scheduled for 7 p.m. on Monday at the board office at 101 Peachtree Road.

Carlsson said the committee also could recommend that the school board use the remainder of the extra state aid for needed facility repairs and to avoid charging a "pay to play" fee for athletics at Ridge High School.

"We're very happy," said parent Adam Hecht, who by the end of last January 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 he had received an email from the school district on Thursday morning with the information that the board finance subcommittee had on Wednesday night voted to recommend full funding for full-day kindergarten this fall.

He said The Bernards Township Public School Initiative already has a mechanism set up for returning the money, preserved in a special fund. However, having just received the information, 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 Gov. Chris Christie's announcement that additional funding would go to school district's statewide, Hecht said he believes the so-called kindergarten 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 that was being discussed last year with the

"Think of all the parents who might have send their kids to private school and would have committed funding" to those full-day kindergarten programs, he said.

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.

But she said the board's decision to cut full-day kindergarten last November as one of the cost-saving measures for the 2011-12 school year was not premature. She said the board had made that decision on the basis of a 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 to plan its next school year programs based on aid figures available at the time.

The state then announced last March it would increase the amount of aid to Bernards Township schools to about $1.6 million, which allowed the school board to reverse another decision last November to cut the school day at Ridge High School from nine periods to eight. 

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

"It's not a windfall," Carlsson said. She added the district still is receiving far less than a few years ago, and has no idea if the extra funding will be available the following year.

After announcing the added state aid last week, the governor's office followed up with a recommendation that the funding be returned to taxpayers by reducing the local school tax rate for 2011-12. School districts and municipalities had until this past Tuesday to take that option, but the Bernards Township school district declined to seek that reduction.

Carlsson said the school district has a long list of needed building repairs. The abandonment of the "pay to play" fee for athletics would cost about $70,000, she estimated.

At the very least, Carlsson said it would have helped the district plan its school program for this year by being aware much earlier in the year of the level of funding that Bernards could expect to receive from the state. "We never know from year to year" what state aid figure to include in the budget, she said.

Hecht said he had been notified by Schools Superintendent Valerie Goger that The Bernards Public School Initiative's rapidly organized and herculean task of raising the kindergarten funds so quickly this year had been "awesome."

Hecht, his wife Janina and other parent organizers spearheaded a formally organized fund to prevent next year's kindergarten program from being cut to about two hours and 30 minutes.

Hecht said during the meeting's first public session that not all the donations came from parents whose children would be attending kindergarten next year.

"The community support in this endeavor has been tremendous, and should be considered a referendum," Hecht said in his comments before the board's vote. The Bernards Township Public School Initiative, as the full-day kindergarten supporters are called, reported progress on its website.

Janina Hecht later said that parents of children who have left kindergarten donated up to a few thousand dollars because they felt that keeping the program was important, but even those without children entering kindergarten had donated.