Election Aftermath Stirs Debate on Moving School Vote

Election Aftermath Stirs
Debate on Moving School Vote

After the April 15 Annual School Election, when voters selected nearly 1,600 school board members and approved approximately 74 percent of school budgets, the debate has now turned to a new issue: Moving the school election to November.

It remains to be seen exactly what form such a proposal would take.

Last week, voters in 404 of 549 school districts passed their local budgets for a success rate of 73.6 percent. According to news reports, the average 2008 school budget had a proposed tax-levy increase of 2.8 percent—slightly below the 4-percent cap.

However, voter participation continued to be unenthusiastic. Only 14.3 percent of the state’s nearly 4.8 million voters turned out for last week’s school election. Voter turnout for school elections since 1990 has averaged 15 percent.

Call for Change Afterward, Assembly Speaker Joe Roberts weighed in publicly with a call to scrap the vote on school budgets and to move the decision on selecting board members to the November general election.

“It’s time for New Jersey to wake up to the reality that the April school elections are a poor way to decide the direction of public education in districts across the state,” Roberts said in a prepared statement. “It makes no sense to continue holding elections in which a super-minority of voters participate. Greater voter turnout will lead to greater accountability when it comes to property taxpayers’ money.”

He said he plans to move legislation before the end of June that would effectuate the changes.

NJSBA Supports NJSBA supports the elimination of public votes on school budgets that are kept within the state’s predetermined levy cap. Only nine other states put their public-school budgets out for a vote, and most of those occur only when the budget proposal exceeds certain spending limits. In New Jersey, the school budget is the only major budget that citizens vote on, and it can also be the only budget where citizens can take out their frustrations on spending in general—even if the higher taxes were due to state, county or municipal issues.

NJSBA Opposes However, NJSBA opposes the concept of moving board member elections to November. Many board of education members are concerned that such a move would greatly entangle school elections with partisan politics—despite the best efforts of state officials to prevent it from occurring.

State lawmakers have introduced four bills to change school elections. Two bills (S-794 and A-1226) would move school board member elections to November, but would not change the law regarding school budgets. Another bill (S-857) would combine the elections of school board members and school budgets, as well as fire districts and nonpartisan municipal elections, on the date of the nonpartisan municipal elections, which are the second Tuesday in May. And a fourth bill (S-488) would move school board member elections to the November general election and eliminate the vote on school budgets, except for separate proposals to spend above cap, which would also occur at the general election.

As an alternative to November school board member elections, NJSBA has proposed a single nonpartisan springtime election for school boards, fire districts and the nonpartisan municipal governing bodies.