The Edison school board faces a budget crisis of its own making. Now what?
After a chaotic series of meetings, the board faces a multimillion dollar hole in its brand new budgdt. Here's how it got here and what comes next.
The Edison Board of Education’s administrative offices on Plainfield Road. (The Central Jerseyan)
Chris Howell | May 4, 2026
It was nearly 11 p.m. Tuesday when board members started raising their hands to say they didn’t know what they had just voted on. A measure rejecting a state grant intended to help expand the township’s new preschool program was buried inside a larger finance package. They hadn’t caught it. Member Christopher Lugo put it plainly mid-rescind vote: “I have to admit, a little confused.”
They voted again. Seven members reversed course and accepted the grant. Then Business Administrator Jonathan Toth told them what that meant.
“You’re just telling us to take apples and replace them with oranges,” he said. “You’re going to need basically $3.7 million. That’s a big, big move.”
The board had passed a budget an hour earlier. Now it had just blown a $3.7 million hole in it. Board President Vishal Patel said they’d go back to the drawing board. The board adjourned. Pre-K families still don’t know if their kids have a program in September.
That moment didn’t come from nowhere. It was the product of five weeks of cascading decisions, some procedural, some political, and some confused, that began in March, when the board voted on a preliminary budget before a single resident had spoken.
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When Toth presented the preliminary budget at the March 24 caucus meeting, he put two figures on the table: total spending of $372 million, and taxes to be raised of $263 million. That’s a $28 million increase, or roughly 11.9%, over the current year. There were no cuts listed. No line items. No explanation of what programs might be reduced or eliminated.
The board voted before a single resident had spoken. The roll call took about 30 seconds. The motion carried 6-2, with Lugo and Virginia White voting no.
The room did not stay quiet for long.
Resident Elizabeth Talke was among the first to the microphone. “We have never in all the years I’ve lived here had a budget presentation like this where you say, ‘This is the amount of it, we’re voting on it,’ without the public input,” she said. “Shame on all of you.”
Toth and Superintendent Edward Aldarelli said that a preliminary budget vote is a legal step required to submit figures to the county by the state deadline. The full presentation and public hearing would come in April, they said.
The public wasn’t satisfied. Resident Tony DePasquale put the blame on board members who had supported zero tax increases over the past five years.
“You sold the public on a campaign slogan,” he said. “You exchanged the honesty of what a board member should have with the residents for your campaign.”
Patel later acknowledged that every sitting board member, including himself, had voted for a zero increase at least once.
The following weeks were marked by escalating pressure. Mayor Sam Joshi publicly called the budget “reckless and irresponsible.” A Change.org petition circulated widely. Meetings drew crowds. The board quietly revised its proposal down to a 6% increase, still significant, but half of what it had submitted to the county.
Edison Business Administrator Jonathan Toth outlines budget impacts during Monday night’s school board meeting. (Edison Television via YouTube)
At the April 23 caucus meeting, Superintendent Aldarelli told residents the district had achieved the reduction by eliminating a planned districtwide air conditioning loan, deferring playground repairs, cutting band equipment purchases, reducing subscription bussing, and cutting staffing at all levels. The budget, as presented, also eliminated the pre-K program. This decision, the board would reverse, partially and confusingly, five days later.
But the night’s most anticipated piece of business was a resolution to terminate the district’s contract to buy the Talmadge Road property, a disputed $9.9 million land deal that had become a flashpoint in the broader budget fight, with critics arguing the money should be returned to taxpayers.
Before anyone could vote on it, Vice President Shannon Peng moved to table the resolution. Two board members were absent, she said. The motion passed 4-3, and the item disappeared from the night’s agenda.
In an email sent in advance of this article, Peng elaborated on the board’s rationale for keeping the land deal in place.
“The land was purchased last year to support long-term tax stabilization and prevent large apartment development,” she wrote. “The district has worked with the Township for five years to secure help acquiring the land, but no support materialized.”
Peng also noted that the board is “still awaiting analysis from certified professionals and state agency approval so the Board can make a fully informed decision based on verified data.” Canceling now, she said, would result in the immediate loss of the $500,000 deposit. Once the analysis is complete, the district may have stronger grounds to recover the deposit if the board then wants to cancel the deal.
Peng said the board had a long-term vision to stabilize taxes for the next 10 to 20 years, but acknowledged that “the current Board may not support this vision.”
What followed became its own controversy. During the resolution-only public comment period, the board’s attorney told residents that because the Talmadge resolution had been tabled, they could not speak to it. Several speakers left believing they were barred from mentioning Talmadge at all.
When Elizabeth Conway, a former board member and longtime Edison resident, finally got to the microphone during the general public comment period, she pushed back directly. “As far as public comment is concerned, when we get up to speak during public comment, I have a right to ask Dr. Aldarelli how many times he gets a haircut,” she said.
The attorney later clarified that during the general public comment period, speakers could address any topic they chose. By then, most of the night had passed.
Board member Christopher Lugo, who had voted against tabling the Talmadge termination, used his board comment time to say what the procedural maneuvering had buried all night.
“We’re cutting capital projects,” he said, “but yet we still have a $9 million headache that’s lingering out there that we’re not reclaiming.” He said he had been asking for a return-on-investment analysis of the property for two years and never received one.
The board’s attorney called a point of order, saying Lugo was straying into pending business and matters covered by attorney-client privilege. Lugo didn’t back down.
“It’s not really your business because it’s our problem,” Lugo said.
The Central Jerseyan reached out to Superintendent Aldarelli, Business Administrator Toth, and the school board for comment in advance of publication. Peng provided written comments. The others did not respond by the deadline.
The April 28 action meeting was supposed to be the resolution that put five weeks of turmoil to rest.
In one sense, it was. The budget passed 5-3, with Errico, Lugo, and White voting no. The 6% tax increase stands, adding roughly $350 more per year in taxes for the average Edison household. The Talmadge land deal survived too. A motion to bring the termination resolution back to the floor failed 4-4, one short of the five votes needed.
But the night’s defining moment was still ahead.
About an hour after the budget passed, several board members raised their hands to say they hadn’t realized the motion rejecting the state pre-K grant was part of the finance package they had just approved. The confusion, the motion to rescind, the re-vote and 7-1 result, and Toth’s flat assessment of what it all meant, played out in front of a room full of people who had spent much of the evening pleading for the program to survive.
The pre-K program is technically no longer cut, but it’s not funded either. Before the votes, Superintendent Aldarelli told the room plainly that current 3-year-olds “will be without a program next year” under the plan the board was approving, and that any alternative the district might pursue would be “not to the scale of what we currently have.” After the reversal, Patel said only that the board would “go back to the drawing board” before tonight’s meeting. What that means for families and pre-K students, he didn’t say.
Adam Glinn, CEO of the JCC of Middlesex County and one of the district’s private pre-K partners, had addressed the board earlier in the night, before any of the votes. “When your decision results in the elimination of the one most significant and pure educational component of this budget,” he said, “respectfully, you should be ashamed of yourselves.”
That was before the board accepted the grant. Before it created the hole. Before it went home.
The Edison Board of Education meets Tuesday evening with a to-do list it created for itself. One key item is to find $3.7 million to fund the pre-K program the board voted to save without a plan to pay for it. Families of current 3-year-olds need an answer before the summer.
The Talmadge Road contract is also unresolved. Peng said the board is awaiting professional analysis and state agency approval before making a final call. The process could be lengthy, and at the end of it, the board could still vote to walk away from the deal.
The 80 staff cuts, the deferred maintenance, the band equipment: those decisions stand. The ones left open tonight are the ones that most directly affect whether a 3-year-old in Edison has a classroom to walk into in September.
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