Little Egg Harbor Council should approve the school budgets as they were submitted because our children are in competition with all the other school districts in New Jersey, the United States, and the World. That is not just in academics but in all the extracurricular activities like sports, music and art. The very areas of education that can be cut in the budget are those extracurricular activities, and bus transportation. Special education is state directed and mandatory so town council will not be allowed to touch that section of the budget. But, we owe it to the children to provide them with a level playing field. So, let's examine the field in relationship to dollars spent to see if it is level for our kids.
Of the four municipalities that send students to the Pinelands Regional School District (Bass River .47, Eagleswood .513, Little Egg Harbor .45, Tuckerton .543) Little Egg Harbor has the lowest levied tax per $100 of assessed property value for their children's education. It would seem the board of education and the superintendent did a great job in containing costs for the community tax payers.
In terms of direct competition with the other districts in the immediate surrounding area, the elementary education costs per $100 of assessed property value (Bass River .599, Eagleswood .581, Little Egg Harbor .399, and Tuckerton .50) our school district cost is considerably less than the neighboring communities to provide a similar education to our children. Again, this appears to be the best bang for the buck and our board and superintendent should be thanked.
In addition, there seems to be a great deal of talk about teacher pay and benefits. Let's just look at information on Southern Regional and Pinelands Regional median pay for the truth. Southern pays its teachers a median pay of $63,220 while the median salary of a teacher at Pinelands is $50,255 and the average in the state of New Jersey is $57,840. You tell me why our teachers should be willing to give up any raises and benefits. I see nothing but dedicated, hard working teachers whenever I visit the school for the many after school activities. Are our teachers not as good as those at Southern Regional? I think they are. But, if they are then we are really short changing our children.
Our school children are in direct competition with all the other schools. Look at Southern Regional High School budget that was passed for over 54 million dollars while the Pinelands budget was only 30 million and rejected by over 800 votes. When you remove the high dollars that Southern gets from the Long Beach Island Communities and compare the rate (.587) Stafford Township pays per $100 to educate the children of Manahawkin at Southern Regional versus Little Egg Harbor Township rate (.45) we are either getting much more bang for our buck or we are short changing our children.
Speaking about short changing the children, let's look at the township web site. What is there to do for our children in this town other than school? The school provides the kids many opportunities that are not available anywhere else in town. See a snap shot of the LEHT web site below:
Information gathered was from the Press of Atlantic City and Wikipedia - you can Google it. Council should act responsibly and approve the budget and begin offering other things for the children of Little Egg Harbor to do - like give more than two hours time to the children at the Community Center with something to do other than sewing and scrape booking.
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