New Jersey Jewish News
New Jersey Feature
Democracy a fool’s game with elections in April
It’s April and time for New Jersey’s biggest April Fool’s
joke: school board elections. Not that it is at all funny. Rather, it is the insignificant way we treat such a significant election. Here is a vote affecting the education of our children and local school funding, which is the largest single component of your property taxes, yet few of us even bother to go to the polls.
The major problem is the timing of the election itself. New Jersey school board elections are held not in November on Election Day, when more dramatic contests like presidential or gubernatorial races bring people to the polls. Nor may they be held on primary day. Instead, they are set for the third Thursday in April, which this year means April 18. We are the only state in the nation with April elections.
According to the National School Boards Association, our school board elections were moved to April to minimize any hint of partisan politics. Whether that goal has really ever been achieved or not is debatable. While school board members serve without pay, which you would think serves as a means to drive away many seeking gain from political office, it does not inhibit those seeking local influence and visibility. Quite the opposite. There is no question that people with political backgrounds and aspirations run for boards of education.
Because of this, and low turnout at the polls, the obvious question is whether elected boards of education really reflect the makeup of the community. Any time you have a small number of people deciding who will hold positions of such great import, you run the risk of having someone with a personal agenda and even minimal organizational skills manipulate the system to wield disproportionate influence.
According to statistics from the 2003 elections, only 15 percent of the state’s eligible voters bothered to vote. Even on a good year, the level of voter participation doesn’t even approach 20 percent.
What this means is that it is fairly easy to get yourself elected to a school board. Anyone with a little political savvy can have an impact with little campaign expense. County clerks maintain voter lists showing who voted in any particular election, so all a candidate needs to do is target mailings and personal contact to those with a history of voting in school board elections, safely ignoring the rest of the electorate. Having to target only 500 or 600 voters is a very manageable task.
New Jersey recently reformed election laws to move the presidential primary from June to February so the state would have greater influence in the determination of presidential candidates. Yet the Legislature didn’t feel it was important to move school board elections to November. Imagine how much money would be saved in the administrative costs alone of not having to hold a separate election.
There are other aspects of these elections that should make you question their fairness and expense. In the primary and general elections, the polls are open from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. Polling hours for school board elections are much more limited, opening later and closing earlier, as though purposely designed to preclude many working people from even being able to get to the polls.
School board election day is also the day voters are asked to approve proposed school budgets. Local school expenses make up the largest part of your local property tax bill. Yet few of us take an interest in the budgeting process. That is particularly poignant right now in light of the state’s budgetary problems.
This year, the amount of state aid to local school districts will be flat at best, if not slightly reduced. Does this mean that local school districts will ask taxpayers to approve budgets that don’t call for increased spending? Hardly. As is fairly typical, the proposed budget in my own town will raise the average property tax bill by $162 per year. And most of the people in town won’t even come out to vote on it.
What is the point of talking about property tax reform in Trenton when the lack of increased state educational funding means that local taxes will rise every year? Even those who do vote aren’t sure of what they are voting for. In the voting booth, they are asked to approve X dollars as the school budget for the coming year. There is no requirement that the question list last year’s expenditures, so a voter can tell if that number represents an increase over the present budget.
And, in those instances where voters actually do vote a budget down, it then goes to the local municipal governing body, which can make cuts or simply choose to restore the defeated budget.
We haven’t even addressed the fact that the state’s 615 separate school districts are probably 500 too many. Some districts don’t even have students. In New Jersey, that’s called the power of home rule.
Everywhere else, it is called insanity.
Comment | |
All rights reserved