Supt. Bing Faces Parents Over Teacher Cuts

In a Power Point presentation that relied extensively on comments from Bloomfield Patch, Bloomfield Schools Superintendent Jason Bing explained the current school budget crunch in front of an auditorium packed with teachers and parents on Tuesday night.

In the presentation, Bing explained his view of the events that led to the current budget shortfall and argued why the job cuts are being proposed. 

Bing, on his second budgeting cycle as Superintendent, said Bloomfield schools have been historically underfunded, with the district relying on federal and state money for basic expenditures.

“We spend nothing on our kids,” Bing said.

After studying past budgets, Bing concluded that the district has been underfunded for eight years. As an example, he pointed to Demerest School, which he said annually receives a total of $800,000 from local taxes.

“We’re in stiff competition with Belleville to be the cheapest district in Essex County,” he said. And that’s not a compliment.”

As in his previous budget update, Bing likened district’s bare bones approach to spending as a household living paycheck to paycheck. 

Running through a series of Patch reader comments, Bing asserted that the district was under-spending. He noted that Bloomfield has one new school building while the rest are over 100 years old.

In response to a reader’s comment asking why the district doesn’t freeze wages to stave off budget cuts, Bing said that the district has already done so in the past, with a frequency he characterized as alarming.

“The wage freeze well has been tapped by this district, which is a big red flag,” he said.

In response to a Patch reader comment about wasteful items in the schools budget, Bing said that an auditing firm hired in the previous year had combed through expenses for the first time in about a decade. Bing said they had identified $883,000 paid by the district in excess of health care costs.

Bing said that in the past, politics and publicity stunts had plagued the district’s budget, but he said that neither were core issues this year. He did readily acknowledge and affirm a rumor floated in a Patch comment about healthcare costs. He said that the district had recently settled with their healthcare provider over $2.1 million debt.

Bing said that the district had reached a budget “tipping point” after years of bare bones budgeting and demographic and economic shifts in Bloomfield.

As he said in his previous budget update, Bing said that the school has not budgeted to cap in almost 10 year and that the situation was further stressed by the board's decision three budget cycles ago to pass a zero percent tax increase. He said that in the years since, the town's tax ratables have decreased by $125 million. Meanwhile, Bing said, the state has underfunded the school district over the last decade and recently imposed a 2 percent tax levy cap that does not account for cost of living increases.

In addition, the township's special education costs have steadily rose due to an influx of special needs students. He illustrated the rise by noting that the number of disabled children enrolled in preschool alone had quadrupled in a single year.

He said that he could not yet give exact numbers on which schools would lose jobs—staffing for middle and high schools had not been determined. He presented tentative numbers on elementary school class sizes, but said that the numbers are changing every day. He said that the district is looking at a variety of options, such as outsourcing some roles in the schools, including school nurses.

“There’s not one board member—or myself—that wants class size to rise,” Bing said.

He indicated that after studying five years of budget information that the cuts were necessary. Parents addressing Bing following the presentation decried the looming cuts nonetheless.

One parent said that they felt that they were caught off guard by the recent announcement of the district’s budget woes.

“I feel like I’ve been blindsided,” the parent said. “Three weeks before this, I was in a meeting with [Superintendent Bing] and he said they were considering hiring more physical education teachers.”

Several parents pointed to the district’s recently instated use of the language software Rosetta Stone in place of language as an example of a technology being a poor replacement for a teacher.

“This program is horrendous and the kids hate it,” the parent said.

Other parents spoke in favor of instituting pay to play sports and other fees could bring more money into the district.

After asserting that outsourcing would be more trouble than it is worth, one parent said that the cuts would have reverberations beyond the school district.

“Bloomfield, as a town, its survival is on the line,” the parent said. “I can’t imagine there’d be much demand to live in Bloomfield after this.”