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 Posted: Wed, Nov 17 2010, 6:07 pm EST Post subject: Re: Central Jersey Waste and Recycle $75 per quarter |
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[quote="Guest"] | Guest wrote: | | guest25 wrote: | | Guest wrote: | | guest25 wrote: | | As an FYI, the TC is looking at garbage because the voters said do it, the voters could have said no and it would have stopped. The TC has nothing to do with our school taxes. That is the BOE who has nothing to do in turn has nothing to do with the garbage proposal. |
I know the BOE has nothing to do with school taxes. However, it makes up well over 60% of my total tax bill. Saving $200 or so a year on garbage is nothing to sneeze at, however, it's like trying to put out a campfire in the middle of a forest fire. |
Realistically if you want to save a lot of money on school taxes your best bet is to move. A lot of people in this town moved here for the schools and from their POV that's the main benefit of paying taxes here. That's why when well over half of all school budgets were rejected by voters earlier this year ours won approval by a landslide. So, right or wrong, you are in the minority. And Christie can't help short of forcing the entire township to merge since we already get $0 from the state and cover 100% of our costs locally.
In fact, over 25% of the school budget is state mandated programs that benefit less than 10% of students. So if you really want to save money on school taxes the solution is to get the state to reduce its mandated program which they don't help fund, or to at least fund programs they mandate. |
It's such a pain to have to adequately educate those unfortujnate disabled children - what were those governmental officials in Trenton thinking? |
The problem with that kind of thinking is it automatically assumes all spending is necessary and all the mandates are appropriate. Thinking like that is why government spending is so much less efficient and so bloated compared to private industry. Successful businesses challenge every assumption, audit every expense and then do so again year-after-year. Your logic is to knee-jerk say if it is mandated it must be good and appropriately handled. There’s no room for improvement.
The post didn’t suggest all mandates go away. It suggested that if the state mandates it, they should contribute to the cost. NJ State sends over $10 billion a year to public schools. Yet despite their mandates contributing almost a quarter of Cranbury School’s budget they don’t send a dime here. If the State believes these are important programs, why not direct some of their funding, which is contributed to by our taxes, to their programs? As it stands the state is taking Cranbury’s money, mandating what we pay for then sending our money to other schools and leaving us to pay again.
No one said we shouldn’t provide reasonable support for disabled (I believe the current term is “challenged”) kids. But even beyond the potential for misclassification and redundant or ineffective services is the a broader point about what is the appropriate obligation of communities that goes far beyond Cranbury. For example, the original intent of one law was that if some mentally or physically challenged children had needs that exceeded the capacity of the public schools that the district (i.e. the community taxpayers) were obligated to pay the full tuition for a private school or intuition that could better handle them. It was supposed to be determined case-by-case and the school was supposed to have the option to attempt to help the child within the system if they believed they could. In practice it has devolved into a system where parents, regardless of personal wealth, can unilaterally tell a school system they want full private tuition to the institution of their choosing without even letting the school see or evaluate the child or spend even one day in school. In other words, parents have a free ride to pick anywhere they want at any cost and automatically say “pay for this” without even giving the school a chance. And the taxpayers pay every dime. Some parents now “game” that system, moving to a convenient proximity of the private institution they want to use and making the local community they moved to for the sole purpose of the private school pay without even meeting the child. And this is but one example. |
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