By ROBERT LINNEHAN
The Haddonfield Sun
The Haddonfield School District was blindsided Wednesday as the state announced it would not be receiving any aid for the 2010–2011 budget.
Superintendent Alan Fegley said the district — like the majority of school districts throughout the state — was planning on seeing its aid cut by about 15 percent this year, or about $300,000 from the $1.5 million total it received last year. Instead, when the cuts were announced, the Haddonfield district realized it would be receiving exactly zero dollars for 2010–2011 budget in state aid.
The $1.5 million cut is almost 5 percent of last year’s total budget.
In a press release sent out hours after the cut, Fegley voiced his displeasure at the situation.
“By law the district is required to produce a tentative budget by next Monday, March 22, 2010, and a final budget by March 26, 2010,” Fegley said in the release. “Many decisions will need to be made over the next few days. None of them will be pleasant.”
Board of Education President Steve Weinstein said he was surprised that Haddonfield was the only school district in Camden County to lose 100 percent of state aid just days before a tentative budget is due.
The board’s finance committee is meeting, and Fegley is looking for solutions to close this $1.5 million gap, he said, but it’s likely to result in enormous cuts in the district’s budget.
“Cuts will be made in our programming and probably in our staffing,” Weinstein said. “For a district that gets so little state aid to begin with, to be hit with this literally hours before we were to adopt the budget is unconscionable.”
Weinstein said the board of education may hold an emergency meeting sometime over the weekend as well to debate different options to help bridge the deficit.
At the last board of education meeting, the district representatives had discussed cutting $600,000 from the budget and setting the local tax rate at 2.53 percent. It’s unknown how this new reduction in state aid will affect those numbers, according to board representatives.
See updates on this story at www.haddonfieldsun.com and in future print editions of The Sun.
