Livingston schools will soon be capturing the power of the sun as well as capturing the minds of the students they teach. Work has begun installing solar panels on the rooftops of all nine district schools. The district will benefit from the solar panels by reducing energy costs and generating revenue from the energy produced that is sold to utilities. It's all part of the district's efforts to find new ways to be efficient with the money it has to spend to educate close to 6,000 students, said Superintendent of School Dr. Brad Draeger in an interview with Patch for the EduNation report on …

When it was announced last school year that the state's Department of Education was slashing aid to Livingston by $4,312,693 for this school year — or a 100 percent cut in the amount of aid it had been receiving from the state, making Livingston one of the 59 districts statewide and 6 in Essex County that entirely lost state aid in the wake of Gov. Chris Christie's budget cuts — the axes came out. "Livingston is especially struggling with this loss because we have been cutting for the last four years," said Superintendent Dr. Draeger last spring when he presented an explanation of how the …