The Board of Education is already talking about the 2010-2011 school budget and they are analyzing each line item with scrunity now so as not to repeat the situation the district faced last year when Gov. Chris Christie cut 100 percent of Summit's state aid with just two weeks to file a budget. Since the district's administrators are already talking about the budget, the residents of Summit should be, too. The School Report Card, released recently by the State Department of Education, sheds light on several data points relating to the education of students in the Hill City. Most notably is a …

The fate of Summit High School's literary magazine, Quintessence, rests on a grant application to the Summit Educational Foundation. The literary magazine was just one of several student organizations at the high school and the Lawton C. Johnson Summit Middle school that was affected by the budget cuts made last year in the wake of a total loss in state aid and additional cuts mandated by the city common council. "Our focus was to try to maintain as much programming as possible," Summit High School Principal Paul Sears said. The school district lost slightly more than $2.5 million when Gov. …

Expect the unexpected. If anything, that's what Summit residents learned this winter first when Gov. Chris Christie announced March 17 that Summit would lose 100 percent of its state aid, slightly more than $2.5 million. Then, the common council pulled a wild card out of its back pocket. "Council has a responsibility to control increases," Councilman Rich Madden, also the head of the finance committee, said at the April 7 council meeting. "The voters have mandated change." A little-known law allowed council to do its own audit of the schools budget, which resulted in a request to trim an …