Board sets school activity fees

Now you really will pay to play. At its meeting of Aug. 17, the Manalapan- Englishtown Regional School District Board of Education approved a policy that gives district officials the option to charge pupils a fee to participate in school sports and activities, and then used that policy to set fees for activities beginning in September.

More specific information regarding the fees is expected to be provided to parents as the 2010-11 school year gets under way next week.

At its meeting in Englishtown, the board voted 7-1 to charge $50 per student to participate in a sport or activity during the 2010-11 school year and to charge $100 per student (a reduction from the previously announced $150) to take instrumental music lessons in 2010-11.

Board members Joseph DePasquale, Michele Stipelman, Annamarie Galante, Diane Bindler, Lori Semel, Brian Graime and board President Donna Formoso voted yes on the fees.

Board member Valerie Maglione voted no on the fees.

Board member James Mumolie was absent from the meeting.

The action puts the Manalapan-Englishtown district in the same situation as many other New Jersey school districts which have started charging students a fee to participate in interscholastic sports, intramural sports, and school activities and clubs.

The board members chose not to accept a recommendation that was made by Superintendent of Schools John J. Marciante Jr. to use anticipated savings from lower health insurance costs to eliminate the planned sports and activity fees for 2010- 11.

“I know (the sports and activity fees) are going to impact those programs. Parents are not going to pay the fees because they can’t. We are hurting specific children. This is a direct tax on parents,” Marciante said. “We are asking parents with multiple children to pay extra taxes with these fees. The economy is hard.”

While they approved a $50 fee per pupil for sports participation, the board members chose not to add a $25 fee per pupil for transportation to interscholastic sports events.

The $50 fee is per sport, so if a middle school student earns a place on a fall, winter and spring sports team, his or her parents will pay a total of $150 for the child’s participation during the school year.

Marciante told the board it is not clear how middle school interscholastic sports will play out in Monmouth County this year with some schools still providing teams at no cost to students and some schools charging for participation.

The fees being charged to students range from the $50 that Manalapan-Englishtown is charging to more than $600 the Howell K-8 School District Board of Education has said it will charge students to play interscholastic basketball.

Marciante said school administrators will not know exactly what the impact of the new fees will be until school opens and students who are willing and able to pay the fees show up for team tryouts.

The Manalapan Englishtown Middle School, home to the district’s seventh- and eighth-graders, is the only school in the district that offers interscholastic sports.

In a bit of good news, Marciante announced that the district is going to be realizing savings in health care costs based on information received from the state that an anticipated increase of 23 percent from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31, 2011 will be lowered to 8.5 percent.

The district’s employees are covered in a state health care plan.

The superintendent said that during the development of the district’s 2010-11 budget, residents had been told by district administrators, based on the information the administrators received from the state, that health care costs for 2011 would be increasing 23 percent.

He said state officials informed the district two weeks ago that the increase for 2011 will be significantly lower than what had projected.

Given that unexpected development, Marciante said he believed the board should take some of the expected savings and use it in a way that would directly impact students as a goodwill gesture to the community.

With the anticipated savings in health care costs, the board resolved to: proceed with a textbook purchase for the 2011-12 school year that had previously been postponed; provide headsets to children who will be learning Spanish this year with the Rosetta Stone program; reimburse parents who already purchased the headsets; hire another second-grade teacher for the Milford Brook School due to increasing enrollment; and hire a part-time resource room teacher at the Wemrock Brook School.

The anticipated health care savings will also fund a network upgrade that was approved on Aug. 17 in the approximate amount of $76,000, according to district administrators.

As the board members discussed the ways to use the anticipated savings in health care costs, DePasquale urged the panel to provide the headsets that pupils will need in order to use the Rosetta Stone Spanish program.

“We should be paying for those headsets,” he said. “Our job is to educate, not to provide activities.”

The board members eventually decided to pay for the headsets and to institute the participation fees for sports and activities.