Little Egg Harbor Township School District<\/a> who are in most need of extra support in the classroom. <\/p>\nIn March, 2026, school board members in Little Egg Harbor Township voted to eliminate the positions for the upcoming school year with a plan for part-time employees to fill the roles. <\/p>\n
There are 81 paraprofessionals and pre-school teaching assistants impacted by this decision and they were told that if they want to stay on, they have to apply for the part-time positions. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe were all very blindsided,” paraprofessional Denise DeVito said. \u201cThe children will be greatly affected by not having the consistency of us there.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, the school board got an earful from outraged parents and district staffers at a budget meeting who say they believe special education students will be hurt the most. <\/p>\n
Officials said that this decision was not an easy one. <\/p>\n
They explained that it’s needed to help offset a nearly 33% spike in healthcare costs and that many other New Jersey school districts are facing similar financial pressures. <\/p>\n
District leaders say that the level of services to students will continue under this new restructuring plan, but some are not convinced. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re losing the extra care that they need,” parent Brittney Kalinowski said. \u201cIt’s absolutely insane for many reasons.\u201d<\/p>\n
A union representative told the school board that abolishing the full-time positions is illegal and vowed to challenge the decision. <\/p>\n
The board president told NBC10 that they are open to negotiating with the union.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As school districts are cutting costs and shrinking budgets, one Jersey Shore community is outraged after officials voted…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":150669,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[915,49431,69,71,70],"class_list":["post-150668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-new-jersey","tag-ocean-county","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150668\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}