Most Bloomfield School Staff Jobs Saved After Last-Minute Negotiations

The Bloomfield Schools budget crisis has largely been averted, school officials announced this week.

Following a Tuesday afternoon agreement reached with health insurance company Cigna, Bloomfield School officials announced that the majority of staff jobs slated to be lost have been restored. In addition, programs relegated to the chopping block, including sports and extracurricular and after school programs, have been restored.

Bloomfield Schools Superintendent Jason Bing told the hundreds gathered in the BHS auditorium for the final public hearing on the budget that Cigna had earlier that day agreed to defer a $500,000 payment from the district. Bing said the payment, part of a $2.1 million settlement the district owes the insurance carrier, will be made next year. Bing said the payment will be budgeted for and will not disrupt the district as it threatened to this year.

The budget still entails staffing reductions. Sixteen members of the Child Study Team, who work with special needs students, will be outsourced, or replaced by non-tenured contract employees. Five Secretarial jobs will be cut and two administrator positions have been eliminated. Two administrative positions were eliminated. The basic skills program has been reconfigured to after-school hours and major cuts are being made to security staff.

School nurses were discussed as candidates for outsourcing at an emergency budget meeting earlier this month but have been returned to the budget.

Bing said the district is operating under a “bare bones budget,” and that unnecessary spending had been surgically cut from the budget following a line-by-line analysis of expenses. Substantial savings, Bing said, come from paying certain salaries entirely with Federal dollars. The district was also able to contain the cost of transporting special needs students in out of district schools, which Bing said was a large savings.

The average Bloomfield home, assessed at $276,000, will see a $281 tax increase under the budget. Per state law, the increase is less than 2 percent of the previous year. There will not be a question on the ballot about the budget.

Overall, the district’s expenses totaled $95,635,842, up about $4.7 million from the previous budget. The school anticipated that $66.4 million, about 74 percent of the total, will come from local taxes, with the rest coming from state, federal and other sources.

Bing stressed during his presentation that the outlook for the board was secure.

“This has been a rough five or six months for teachers,” Bing said. “We are trying to set sail on smooth seas in coming years.”