The East Hanover Township Board of Education sat down on April 27 and signed off on a $31.8 million school budget. The number is big. The reason it got that big isn’t what most people would guess.
It wasn’t a new building. It wasn’t a spike in teacher salaries. It was healthcare.
Medical and prescription benefits for district staff jumped just over 25% in a single year. That one line item added $1.4 million in new costs to a budget that was already being stretched in other directions. Carol Delsandro, the board secretary and school business administrator, didn’t bury it.
For homeowners, that translates to about $260 more per year on the average property, which the district values at $365,543. The tax rate works out to 52.59 cents per $100 of assessed value—about $525 per $100,000. The average household ends up paying roughly $2,000 to the district annually under the new plan.
Here’s the other thing happening underneath the healthcare story. East Hanover’s schools have been absorbing a wave of new students for years. The district served 865 kids in 2021. Today that number is 1,123. That’s 258 more children—a 30% increase—across three schools handling pre-K through eighth grade, in five years.
More kids mean more everything. More classrooms, more buses, more teachers, more benefits. The budget reflects that with three new positions added specifically to manage class sizes that have been pushing against their limits.
What’s striking is what didn’t happen. While districts across Essex County and Morris County have been making cuts and laying off staff, East Hanover held the line. Programs stayed intact. Staffing levels didn’t drop. That’s not easy to pull off when healthcare bills are climbing 25% and enrollment keeps going up.
Salaries and benefits together eat up nearly 77% of the total budget. Transportation accounts for about 5%. Everything else—student programming, professional development, supplies—runs around 12%.
The money has to come from somewhere, and in East Hanover it mostly comes from local taxpayers. About 90% of district revenue is property tax funded. State aid and enrollment-based funding helped at the margins—and the enrollment growth that’s driving costs is also the reason the district qualified for more of it, which is a dynamic a lot of fast-growing NJ districts know well.
The budget has been approved by the board. A public hearing will follow before final adoption.