Your vote doesn't count

Chalk up another black mark against New Jersey's annual school budget voting fiasco. In April, voters defeated the Freehold Borough Board of Education's proposed tax levy for the 2006-07 year.

The board asked borough residents and business owners who pay property taxes to pony up $7 million as their share to support a $15.6 million budget for the coming school year. The proposal called for a 5.4-cent increase in the K-8 school tax rate.

Voters rejected the proposed tax levy 543 to 269. Their votes were rendered meaningless when the state commissioner of education determined last week that the budget proposal voters rejected on April 18 would stand for 2006-07 school year.

We take Freehold Borough school administrators at their word when they say their budget proposal reflected what is needed to educate the borough's 1,400 public school children next year. The rising cost of health insurance, fuel and utilities cannot be blamed on local school representatives and administrators. Anyone who operates their own home or business knows that.

Perhaps an argument can be made that harder negotiations are needed with the teachers union in regard to salary increases and contributions to their health benefits package. Fair enough.

But the overriding reason why Freehold Borough and other school districts throughout the News Transcript's coverage area are feeling the pressure from voters is New Jersey's broken school funding formula. The only way voters presently have to express their displeasure with a system that is so obviously flawed is to reject school budgets.

Freehold Borough voters did just that and then saw their wishes disregarded. Is it any surprise that the majority of people who are eligible to vote in a school election choose not to do so? No, it is not.

Indications from Trenton are that our state representatives have finally gotten the message that residents want a change in the way schools are funded. That message reverberates loud and clear on the pages of New Jersey's newspapers on a constant basis.

There is, however, a strong sense of uncertainty as to whether New Jersey's representatives can stop the broken educational funding wheel from spinning in one direction and begin to take the steps that are necessary to restore a sense of fairness to all school districts.

Until that happens we will continue to see ridiculous situations like the one in Freehold Borough where voters have their say on a school budget and watch as that vote is overturned with the stroke of an education commissioner's pen.