Absent for the Budget, Online During the Meeting, and a No Vote on a Typo Fix

You may remember our coverage from January 2025, when we asked what was more important to Donna Carey than the students being recognized in front of her-because she was on her phone during student awards. An OPRA request later confirmed it wasn’t board business.

Fast forward to March 2026: Carey skipped the budget meeting entirely. But she wasn’t unreachable.

She was online.

The March Meeting: One Empty Seat at the Most Important Table

At the March board meeting, roll call was taken. Eight members were present.

“Mrs. Carey: absent.”

That’s the former board president. Absent. For the budget meeting.

The tentative 2026–27 budget-carrying a 6.65% tax levy increase and a gap requiring $239,000 in cuts-was presented, debated, and discussed by every other board member. Dr. Ryder walked through the financial picture in detail. Board members asked hard questions. The conversation went on for nearly an hour.

Donna Carey wasn’t there for any of it.

But here’s where it gets interesting.

She Wasn’t at the Meeting-But She Was at the Meeting

At the April special meeting, a community member named Jeff Altieri addressed the board. He had spoken at the March meeting about the history of irresponsible budgeting-specifically calling out board members who had pushed for a 0% tax increase in prior years, burned through reserves, and are now pointing fingers at the mess they helped create.

His account of what happened next?

“A certain board member went online, ironically during the meeting, and called me a liar.”

Let that land for a moment.

Donna Carey was absent from the March budget meeting. She was not at the dais. She did not participate in the budget discussion. She did not hear the presentation. She did not ask a single question on behalf of Hardyston taxpayers.

But she found time, during that same meeting, to go online and call a resident a liar for stating a matter of public record.

This is the same former board president who was photographed on her phone during student recognition. The same former board president whose OPRA records showed no official district business was being conducted during that time. And now, the same former board president who skips a critical budget meeting-but apparently has enough bandwidth to monitor the livestream and post online attacks against residents.

So the question from 2025 stands: What exactly is more important than doing the job?

The April Vote: No on a Typo

On April 16th, the board held a special meeting. The purpose was narrow and unambiguous. The county had flagged a clerical mismatch between the budget resolution approved in March and what was entered into the state’s reporting system. A number had been entered incorrectly.

Board President Brian Drelick was explicit:

“The action tonight is purely clerical and a formality.”

He said it again, clearly: nothing about the 6.65% figure could be changed that night. This was a correction to a data entry error. That’s it.

The vote passed 7–2.

Donna Carey voted no.

She offered a comment before the vote-saying she didn’t feel fully informed and would have opposed the 6.65% figure. But the vote was not on the 6.65%. It was on correcting a typo.

To be clear about what a “no” vote here actually means: Carey voted to block a technical correction to a budget she wasn’t present to debate, at a meeting that existed solely because of a data entry error.

She Helped Build This Hole-Then Refused to Show Up

This didn’t happen in a vacuum. The 6.65% tax levy increase on the table this year is not an accident, and it is not someone else’s fault.

It is the direct and foreseeable result of budget decisions Donna Carey and Tony Alfano made in prior years.

Here is the mechanism, documented in the public record from the March meeting itself:

Rather than taking the standard 2% annual levy increase that districts use to keep pace with rising costs, Carey and Alfano pushed for artificially low increases-including a 0% tax increase-and used one-time funding sources to cover ongoing operating costs. Specifically:

The SHIF dividend (School Health Insurance Fund)-a one-time windfall from a good claims year-was used to fill structural budget gaps instead of being held as a buffer
Extraordinary aid (special education reimbursement) was pulled in as a recurring budget line rather than treated as the one-time offset it is
Fund balance and reserves were drawn down year after year to keep the levy number politically palatable

Dr. Ryder said it plainly at the March meeting: using one-time tools to cover ongoing costs is not a sustainable practice. “Anytime you chip into that fund balance, it reduces your flexibility for future budgets.”

Board member Nick Demsak did the math at the April meeting: had the board simply taken the standard 2% each year as most responsible districts do, this year’s increase would have been approximately 5%-not 6.65%. The additional burden on taxpayers this year, beyond what was necessary, traces directly to those prior decisions.

Jeff Altieri made this same point at the April meeting, calling out board members who took credit for “stopping the spending” while quietly pushing the bill down the road. His reward for stating this on the public record at the March meeting?

Carey went online-during the meeting she skipped-and called him a liar.

So to be precise about what happened: Carey and Alfano’s budget decisions directly contributed to the 6.65% increase. Carey then skipped the meeting where that increase was debated. She monitored the livestream and attacked a resident who pointed out her role. And then she voted no on the paperwork.

That isn’t a governance disagreement. That is breathtaking audacity.

The Numbers Don’t Lie: What the Advertised Budget Actually Shows

The May 7, 2026 public hearing budget filing puts hard numbers behind what was previously a matter of record and testimony. Here is what the advertised budget shows:

The one-time revenues that propped up last year’s budget-and are now gone:

Revenue Source	2025-26 Revised	2026-27 Proposed
Unrestricted Miscellaneous Revenues (incl. SHIF)	$300,000	$0

The SHIF dividend and other one-time miscellaneous revenues used to offset ongoing operating costs in prior years are simply not there in 2026-27. They were never a sustainable source. They were a one-time windfall used to make the budget numbers look manageable-and to avoid a politically uncomfortable tax increase. Now the levy has to cover the gap.

What that means for taxpayers:

The 2026-27 tax levy is proposed at $12,048,799-an increase of $751,799 over the prior year’s $11,297,000, which equals the widely cited 6.65%.

But if that $300,000 in one-time miscellaneous revenues had been properly replaced by levy revenue last year instead of deferred to this year, the math looks very different:

Corrected 2025-26 levy base: $11,597,000
This year’s levy over that corrected base: $12,048,799 − $11,597,000 = $451,799
That increase as a percentage: ~4%

By relying on one-time SHIF revenues instead of building the levy responsibly, the prior board turned what should have been a 4% increase into a 6.65% increase. That difference-roughly 2.65 percentage points-lands directly on Hardyston property taxpayers this year.

The reserves tell the same story:

The advertised recapitulation of balances shows what happens when a board repeatedly defers the hard decisions:

Reserve	June 2024	June 2025	Est. June 2026	Est. June 2027
Unrestricted Fund Balance	$884,921	$683,594	$363,898	$281,590

The unrestricted fund balance has been cut by two-thirds in three years. Every dollar drained from reserves is a dollar that cannot cushion the district from the next unexpected cost-a roof, a boiler, a spike in healthcare, a state aid cut. The current board inherited a thinning cushion. It didn’t happen by accident.

What the Current Board Cannot Control: Healthcare

To be fair to the board now doing this work, it is worth being precise about what is actually driving this year’s increase-because not all of it is the result of deferred decisions.

The single largest driver of the 2026-27 budget increase is health insurance costs, and that is a statewide crisis entirely outside the current board’s hands.

The advertised budget shows:

	2025-26 Revised	2026-27 Proposed	Increase
Employee Benefits	$2,456,112	$2,870,020	+$413,908
Total Levy Increase			$751,799

Health insurance and benefits account for more than half of the entire tax levy increase-$413,908 out of $751,799. The per pupil cost calculations confirm just how sharp the jump is: employee benefits as a percentage of salaries surged from 30.71% to 36.78% in a single year.

As Nick Demsak noted at the April meeting, the district does not use the state health benefits plan. Its premiums went up approximately 20%, with the district responsible for 70% of that increase. No vote, no policy, no budget decision the current board could have made would have changed that number. It is what it is.

The current board is also making approximately $239,000 in cuts to partially offset these pressures-a responsible step that deserves acknowledgment.

So to be clear about what this budget actually represents: the current board is absorbing a healthcare cost spike it did not cause, with a depleted reserve cushion it did not deplete, while making cuts to soften the blow. The 6.65% increase is the result of both an uncontrollable external cost and the deliberate deferral of structural problems in prior years.

One of those things is bad luck. The other is a choice that Carey and Alfano made-and that Hardyston taxpayers are now paying for.

Fiscal Hawk on the Budget, Free Spender Everywhere Else

Here is the question Hardyston residents should be asking: if Donna Carey is so concerned about taxpayer dollars, why does that concern only apply to the school budget?

Consider what the record actually shows:

She championed a 0% tax increase that drew down reserves and helped create the exact financial pressure the district now faces-detailed in Kicking the Can Down the Road. She voted against budgets designed to maintain stable operations. She skipped the March meeting where this year’s budget was debated-and voted no on the clerical correction. By every public account, she is the fiscal watchdog.

But the record also shows she had no such concern when it came to her own legal fees. As we documented in When the Clowns Run the Circus, legal billings tied to her conduct totaled over $20,000-including nearly $10,000 for her personal ethics defense, followed by additional complaints against fellow board members, none of which resulted in a favorable decision for her.

And as covered in Budget Basics, Confidentiality, and Bean Bag Chairs, concerns also surfaced about her inserting herself into a classroom purchasing decision-something that falls squarely under the superintendent’s authority, not a board member’s.

So the picture that emerges is not a fiscal watchdog. It is something far more selective: opposing the budget that funds classrooms while running up personal legal fees, inserting herself into purchasing decisions that aren’t her call, and skipping the hard conversations she was elected to have.

Fiscal responsibility means applying the same standard consistently-to every line, every vote, and every decision, including the ones that involve your own conduct.

What Accountability Actually Looks Like

It does not require agreement on every vote.

It requires showing up. Participating in the process. And when you cast a no vote on a budget that directly impacts every taxpayer and every student in this district, you owe the public a clear explanation tied to the actual action on the floor.

The record on Donna Carey is now clear:

🔹 Skipped the March budget meeting, then went online during it to attack a resident for stating public facts about her voting record
🔹 Voted no on a typo correction at a special meeting that existed for no other purpose-on a budget she wasn’t present to debate
🔹 Helped create the pressure she now criticizes, by using one-time SHIF revenues and depleting reserves to avoid a responsible levy increase in prior years
🔹 Applied a completely different standard to herself-$20,000+ in legal fees from her own conduct, and inserting herself into operational decisions that belong to the administration

The standard is not complicated. Show up. Do the work. Explain the vote.

Hardyston deserves better.

Tags: Donna Carey Budget Transparency Public Trust Board Leadership