Tonight’s Board of Ed meeting

We’ve got a pretty full agenda for tonight’s meeting of the Ridgewood Board of Education. You can join us at the Ed Center at 7:30 p.m….or tune in on CableVision Channel 77…or watch the live Webcast on the district website…or watch the webcast archive later. Here’s a sampling of what we’ll be doing:

Acceptance of some generous grant awards from the Ridgewood Education Foundation (thank you REF!).

Discussion of our bond rating and the types of financing options available for our Referendum bonds. Our financial advisors and bonding attorney will be present to talk about the different options.

Dr. Fishbein will give us an update on Referendum projects and work being done by our architect and engineer.

We’ll have an update on the 2010-11 budget, with a balanced budget presented. Of course, this is still preliminary as we’re waiting for the Governor’s budget address to get our firm numbers on state aid. We can’t finalize the budget and lock-in the cuts we need to make until we have that info. But as we’ve been saying all along – it’s likely we will need to cut around $3.5 million. The administration is working through various ideas for getting to that number, but however it shakes out, we’re all going to feel the cuts.

The Board will be asked to award the new contract for custodial/maintenance/grounds services to GCA Services Group (our current provider). GCA had the low bid and will be able to continue with the systems and work they’ve been doing (and doing well, in my opinion).

The Board will be discussing the Parent Satisfaction Survey, which the Communications Committee has drafted. The survey is proposed to be administered to all parents in the district to gauge their satisfaction with various aspects of their children’s schools, including academics, extra-curriculars, facilities and communications.

We’ll also be discussing the renewal of Pomptonian Food Services for 2010-2011 school year.

A couple of reminders on upcoming events:

DEP hearing on the field improvements at RHS and Stevens Fields – March 15 @ 6:30 p.m. at the Ed Center, 3rd floor. Note – this is the DEP’s hearing, not ours. We don’t know what the format will be, if there will be a time limit for speakers, etc. All we know is they asked for one hour to be scheduled and we’ll do it right before our regular meeting which will start at 7:30 p.m.

Budget Workshops – Tuesday night at 7:30 p.m. at GW and Wednesday at 1:00 at RHS Campus Center. The focus will be on the budget process and Trenton’s influence on what happens in Ridgewood.

March 22 the Village Council will attend our Board meeting to review the proposed budget.

March 31 Official Public Hearing on the Budget.

Cleaning up the landscape, or "the truth of the changing BOE-Village fields relationship."

Hey, long time no post. Hope your summer is going well. I wanted to clarify and expand on the recent Ridgewood News article that sported a sensational headline, something like “Mean old Ridgewood Board of Ed forces Village to lay-off workers.”

Here are the facts: When the BOE first contracted with the Village to have Village workers perform landscaping and athletic field maintenance on BOE fields, the price was extremely reasonable and we saved a lot of money. But since then, the price has increased and increased. (Never mind the one year they overcharged us by a considerable amount…they did finally rectify that mistake.) Meanwhile, as we faced this year’s budget deficit, our excellent custodial vendor, GCA, wanted to bid landscaping and fields. We alerted the Village that we were going out to bid and fully expected to save several hundred thousand dollars. That’s exactly what happened: the bids from GCA (fields) and Jacobsen (landscaping) were extremely low, and we approved them as our new vendors. How could we not? The Board has a responsibility to save money where we can and get the most and best education possible for our budget and taxpayers’ dollars.

If there were a way for the Village to compete and lower their fees, that would be great. The Village workers provided a great quality of service on BOE properties. But there was no way they would be able to reduce their fees enough. So we had to make the switch. The result is that Jacobsen will do landscaping around the school buildings and GCA will perform all field maintenance and prep (lines, dragging baseball clay, etc.) on BOE athletic fields. The Village will continue to take care of Village fields (Vets, Brookside, Habernickel, Hawes, etc.)

At least one of the Village workers has been hired by GCA. I wish there were a way to work all this out so that no one had to be laid off, but it just wasn’t possible. Unlike the portayal by the Ridgewood News headline and somewhat confusing story, this wasn’t a cold and heartless move by the BOE…we had to make a lot of tough decisions this year. Next year will bring more.