the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Lakewood NJ, The Lakewood school board approved a 2019-2020 budget this week that it doesn’t have the money to fund.
The district sent its lawyer and several administrators to court Wednesday with a desperate plea for help to keep schools open beyond March, when leaders say current funding will run out. Facing a mounting deficit each year, the district had been counting on an additional $30 million in state aid that was included in Gov. Phil Murphy’s budget proposal to balance its books for the coming school year. The school board voted 8-0 to pass a $171 million budget with several contingencies, including that the state Department of Education must provide emergency funding if the $30 million was not put back in the budget .
Department of Education has also noted that the district is rebounding from years of misusing funds, including a prior decision to provide courtesy busing for private school students it was not obligated to pay for.
As a reminder New Jersey is drowning in our public employee debt. $151.5 billion is 4x’s the state’s annual budget.
Public employee debt equals $16,772 for every 1 of New Jersey’s 9 million residents.
Pension & benefits costs will rise by $4.1 billion over the next 4 years & eat up 26% of NJs budget.
Is Ridgewood paying attention? Trenton sure isn’t.
A classic example of how the Hasidic community came into the community years back, demanded busing and all the other special needs to support their community of which no outsiders are welcome. Now you can rot in your self created mess because the good citizens of NJ are not paying. Go start another welfare scam that you were recently caught doing. Who answered for that? Call it what you like but the bottom line is that we’re paying and the Hasidim are laughing all the way to the bank.
Same thing happen in Monroe ny when they took over th schools and created kyras Joel ny and annexed or tried to other nearby district .
Ridgewood within 10 years