By Stephen Appezzato
MIDDLETOWN – In a split vote, the Middletown Township Board of Education last week approved a 10.1% tax increase to cover the 2025-26 school district budget.
After weeks of conversations with parents and stakeholders, the board of education put some of the community’s concerns to rest, opting to raise taxes to avoid school closures and redistricting in the fall.
However, these may be necessary options down the line for long-term financial security.
According to school district business administrator and board secretary Amy Doherty, the increase will draw an additional $8,372,956 from tax dollars, and the district is now eligible for $418,648 in additional state aid from the Tax Levy Incentive Program.
Other school districts across the state made similar budgeting moves this month after becoming eligible to increase their tax levy above the state’s 2% cap.
In April, the school board authorized the district to increase its tax levy up to 10.1% as one option for covering the budget; until last week, it was unknown if officials would opt for the full amount. The move will replace savings from proposed school closures and consolidations with an influx of tax dollars that will close the district’s budget gap and maintain class sizes of 25 students in elementary schools and 28 in secondary schools while skirting some staff cuts.
For the $206 million 2025-26 school budget, the district’s tax levy now totals about $176 million.
“The next question is, where do we go from here?” said superintendent Jessica Alfone at the April 30 board meeting. “Obviously, there is a larger situation here that we’ve talked about” over the last six weeks, she said.
“We’re all at this point in recognition that we have to be doing a multitude of things in order to right the ship and get us back on track to financial health, so that way we can preserve the quality of education that we’ve come to know in Middletown,” Alfone said.
Cost Savings in Budget
Within the district’s final 2025-26 budget are moves to boost efficiency and promote cost savings.
“When we crafted this budget and looked at where we were going to reduce things, our goal was to, No. 1, have no impact to the actual classroom experience of our students,” Alfone explained, noting every department would experience some form of reduction.
The district will reduce its administrative footprint and cut certified staff, mostly by achieving scheduling efficiencies.
“We look to find and maintain the best teaching staff that are certificated to do those jobs, and have potentially positions come off line, but not people,” Alfone said. “We want to employ the best and we want to maintain the best,” she said.
The district will also cut “underrealized” and “underprioritized” digital services, like online teaching tools that are not being used by staff or students, and reduce schools’ budgets for paper and other operating supplies by about 10%. Certain infrastructure projects will also be put on hold while the district prioritizes more urgent projects focused on student safety.
“We dedicated ourselves administratively to really looking at each and every line of the budget to ensure that what we’re spending our dollars on gives us the maximum bang for our buck, so to speak, and drives us towards the greatest efficiency,” Alfone explained. In total, the cuts will save about $6 million.
“Whatever the landscape looks like in the long run, I think we all know that something has to change in order for us to be put back on the right track,” Alfone said.
Planning For The Future
While the board of education was able to avoid school closures for the 2025-26 school year, Alfone said the hard work was just beginning. To avoid future budget gaps, the district launched a strategic planning initiative. The “two-pronged” approach will begin in June, and consists of a facilities utilization analysis and boundaries analysis, ultimately informing the district about how buildings can be best used, as well as recommendations for upgrades and construction and how to make sending regions more efficient. The results of the studies will inform the district how it can best downsize its footprint and rezone schools.
“Being more efficient helps to realize cost savings,” Alfone said. “When your footprint shrinks, you need less people to cover that landscape.”
The school district will also launch a strategic planning steering committee, consisting of parents and stakeholders from all schools, and continue to find methods to reduce budget expenses without reducing students’ experiences.
Alfone noted the final budget passing was not the “end of the road,” but just the beginning of righting the district’s finances.
“The silver lining of all this is that we’re engaged in a conversation that’s really important, and we have a community-wide captive audience and a lot of really smart people that really care about the kids and this community,” she said.
Earlier in April, township officials proposed using funds from Middletown’s open space trust to purchase a 10-acre parcel owned by the school district, as well as restructure the special school law enforcement officers’ agreement so that the township would absorb part of the cost. These actions could have provided roughly $2.6 million in financial support to the district. However no agreements were reached before the township introduced its 2025 budget and the district approved its 2025-26 budget.
In the end, the 2025-26 school budget passed in a split vote with board president Frank Capone and board members Gary Tulp and Jacqueline Tobacco voting against increasing school taxes 10.1%.
Parents, residents and school staff are encouraged to attend the district’s first strategic planning public meeting May 29 at High School North. The New Jersey School Boards Association, which will act as a neutral party, will facilitate the meeting. Planning meetings will also be held June 16 and Aug. 28. More information can be found on the district’s website, middletownk12.org.
The article originally appeared in the May 8 – 14, 2025 print edition of The Two River Times.
