The Hopewell Valley Regional Board of Education adopted a $105.8 million budget that includes a 7-cent tax increase for property owners in all three valley municipalities.
Board President Anita Williams Galiano, Vice President Jacquie Genovesi and board members, Dhruv Kapadia, Mike Wilson, John Slotman, Mark Peters and Amanda Stylianou voted “yes” to adopt the budget on April 28, which funds operations for the 2025-26 school year.
Board members Alex Reznik and Pamela Lilleston were absent from the meeting.
“I know it is not a popular decision to increase taxes more than 2% (tax levy cap),” said Robert Colavita, assistant superintendent of business, noting that in order to maintain programs important to the district community they had to. “Taking those waivers was a way to preserve what we built over the last 50 to 60 years.”
Pennington’s projected tax rate increase is $1.93 per $100 of assessed valuation. The owner of an average home assessed at $489,000 will pay $9,437 in school taxes.
Hopewell Borough’s projected tax rate increase is $1.92 per $100 of assessed valuation. The owner of an average home assessed at $408,000 will pay $7,833 in school taxes.
Hopewell Township’s projected tax rate increase is $1.87 per $100 of assessed valuation. The owner of an average home assessed at $497,000 will pay $9,293 in school taxes.
School taxes are one item on a property owner’s total tax bill, which also includes municipal taxes and county taxes.
The amount an individual pays in property taxes is determined by the assessed value of an individual’s home and/or property, and the tax rate that is set by each taxing entity.
Superintendent Rosetta Treece explained that when they looked to cut from the budget, they wanted to make sure students have the same experience that they have now.
“We might have to do things with less frequency, but we wanted students to have the experience of having STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, math), of having extracurricular sports and extracurricular activities,” she said, noting these are “all the things we have had to do and wanted to do for our kids.”
“We lost auto shop as a result of not being able to hire (a teacher) so it was a way through natural attrition to make a cut because we could not fill a position,” she said. “We tried to avail ourselves of that as much as possible – nonrenewals, resignations, and retirements – to kind of absorb some of that so we can keep our people who do work for us, that we do care about, that we do want to keep on our staff, as whole as possible.”
The 2025-26 projected tax levy is $92.6 million and is the amount property owners from the three municipalities in Hopewell Valley would pay in school property taxes to support the district.
A $1.8 million health benefits waiver and $218,000 enrollment waiver are included in the tax levy.
“The reason we need over a 4 percent increase in tax levy is because we are trying to reduce the amount of fund balance (savings used),” Colavita said. “We have reduced our fund balance by 30%.”
The school district will use $2.8 million in fund balance (savings) as revenue in the budget, which is a $1.2 million decrease from the 2024-25 budget.
“Fund balance is your savings,” Colavita explained. “Using savings to cover recurring expenses can catch up to you.
“We want to be less reliant on savings. We want to do a better job budgeting, so we don’t need savings in our budget. Savings should be used in best practices for one-time expenses – if we are going to repair a roof, implement a program that we can fund with regular monies.”
Appropriations in the budget include $41.6 million towards regular instruction (including $1.4 million on school sponsored athletics); $21.9 million for staff benefits; $20.8 million for special education; $7.7 million for operations and maintenance; $6.5 million for transportation; $4.1 million for debt service; $2.8 million for central office and district services.
Allocated in appropriations is $2.3 million for child study teams and $1.7 million for education media services/library; and there is $273,468 appropriated for capital outlay (equipment, facilities, and construction services).
Outside of the tax levy, proposed revenues include $7.8 million from state aid (approximately $400,000 increase from 2024-25); $2.8 million from the fund balance (savings); $1.7 million from miscellaneous (interest on savings, tuition revenues, facility rentals); and $914,190 from federal aid.
Colavita called the $400,000 increase in state aid a positive sign. However, he noted the district has been shorted about $1 million by the state.
“The state runs a formula, and the formula stated that we should have gotten over $1 million more than we did,” he said. “They just didn’t have the revenue to support giving us all the money we should have gotten. So, I want the public to understand we are doing everything we can with what might be considered a broken state formula.”
The school district was able to take advantage of a health benefit waiver. The $1.8 million health waiver they received helps offset increased costs of healthcare that hit the budget.
With growing enrollment in Hopewell Valley, the school district also received an enrollment waiver of $218,000.
When it comes to federal aid there remains uncertainty. The school district has not been notified on the amount of federal funds they would receive.
This is the time of year we are notified of our IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Act) and title grant fundings (pockets of money designed for specific populations), Colavita said, noting “Our IDEA monies (2024-25) were somewhere in the area of $900,000 and title monies somewhere in the area of $150,000 give or take.”
“IDEA in Hopewell goes directly to special education tuition to help offset that cost,” he said. “Title I money goes directly to our most needy students as additional supports. It also provides some character [education] monies and also some training for our teaching staff.”
The school district administration has been told to anticipate around 75% of what they received this year (24-25), Colavita said, adding, “I’m hoping for better than that, but we were told to anticipate no more than 75%.”
The school district is reimplementing athletic and co-curricular fees to help defray some of the costs.
“It won’t cover everything,” Colavita admitted. “It will allow us to maintain those programs that we might otherwise have had to cut. Something else that we have implemented or [we are] going to increase this year are transportation fees just to be able to maintain that program.”
Driving costs in the budget include inflation, which continues to be a problem in areas such as health benefits, and energy, which has increased by 20% with another increase expected in June driven by artificial intelligence (AI) subcenters and server centers.
“Transportaion continues to go up,” he said. “This year transportation increases 3.57 percent on top of what we were paying this year. Not a whole lot of area for savings.
“Facility and Maintenace costs continue to rise. Things don’t last as long as they used to in a disposable environment.”
District staffing continues to be a significant part of the budget. Salary and benefits for all district staff members is about 80% HVRSD’s budget, Colavita added.
“To make big dents in our budget unfortunately it is human resources,” he said. “It is not where we want to go if we can save it and get a great savings in our insurance renewals. Unfortunately, we can’t, a lot of our insurance is governed by the state.”
