By Stephen Appezzato
NEW JERSEY – The state Legislature is advancing bills to restore millions in lost funding to school districts facing cuts.
As The Two River Times reported in March, the Red Bank Borough School District is eying a 19.6% funding cut next year – a $1.7 million loss. The Long Branch and Asbury Park school districts also face severe cuts – totaling $10.4 million and $4.1 million, respectively.
Lawmakers have until midnight June 30 to send school funding legislation to Gov. Phil Murphy’s desk for approval before his 2025 state budget is approved. Multiple bills are being floated to restore funding. State Sen. Vin Gopal (D-11) said he is unsure if any of the bills will ultimately be approved but noted he will have a better idea this month.
The state Assembly approved the most promising legislation, A4161, in April. Its sister bill, S3081, is currently being reviewed by the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee. If signed, the law would appropriate $71.4 million toward a Stabilized School Budget Aid Grant Program, which would award qualifying districts up to two-thirds of the funding lost next year. Districts would then be allowed to increase their local tax levy up to 9.9% to make up for the remaining third.
Gopal said he is “a little concerned” about the bill’s tax levy component but is “open-minded to everything.”
“I want to see what kind of aid we can get when the governor’s office tells what they’re comfortable with,” he said.
“We want to take the existing bill and try to add a little bit more to it and make this a little bit more holistic,” he said, wishing to avoid districts being too “top heavy,” pointing to the Asbury Park School District as an example.
“For years, Asbury Park has been getting state aid even though their enrollments are going down, but they’ve been sitting on buildings that they could sell for millions of dollars that nobody’s been using,” he said.
It is challenging to balance restoring lost state funding and avoiding overfunding districts.
“If a school district has, hypothetically, 20 sports teams and three extra lacrosse programs, but then school district two doesn’t have any of that, what is the state’s responsibility to pay for that versus what is the local district’s?”
In 2018, Murphy signed the S-2 legislation that overhauled New Jersey public school funding. The goal of the legislation was to provide more funding to districts in need while preventing overfunding of other districts. The upcoming school year will be the final year of S-2’s implementation.
“I’d like to see the county superintendent, DOE (Department of Education), really do a full assessment in some of these areas, and also understanding what exactly is the money going for and how is it going to be sustainable long-term,” Gopal said. At the root of S-2 is a state funding formula that takes into account a district’s enrollment and local economic and other factors to determine how much funding it would receive versus what portion would be provided from local tax revenue, known as the local share. The proposed round of state funding for 2025 resulted in drastic cuts for some districts because the formula uses changes in local property values as one criterion.
Gopal said a significant focus of the legislature this summer will be reworking this funding formula to create “something that’s not so dependent on property values.”
“That’s the biggest problem with the formula. The formula assumes that property values in a town are the same” throughout the municipality, he said.
One example of this is the economic environment in Long Branch, where “millions of dollars in condos are being bought – a lot by people from New York, second homes, but first homes, too – across Ocean Avenue near Pier Village.”
But in other parts of the city, Gopal said, 77% of the public school students are in the free and reduced lunch program because of their family’s income level.
The formula averages property values by zip code, which overlooks geographic wealth disparities. Asbury Park is in a similar boat, with wealth and development consolidated along the waterfront.
In Red Bank, with multiple developments in the works and booming property values, the local share of the district’s 2025 budget was also skewed.
“The wild swings in the formula are crazy,” Gopal said, noting Long Branch was gaining about $600,000 each year in state funding until now, when the district is eyeing a $10.6 million swing.
When the upcoming round of school funding was released in February, these districts scrambled to draft new 2025 budgets, weighing staffing and programming cuts to account for losses.
“I don’t want to see classroom sizes increase,” Gopal said.
“There will absolutely be a package to give relief to these districts that are getting cut, but at the same time, make sure that this isn’t a problem we’re going to have every year,” he said.
The legislative effort to restore funding to districts in need is bipartisan, with lawmakers across the aisle eager to address flaws in the S-2 funding formula while cautious about allowing sharp increases in school districts’ local tax levy.
The article originally appeared in the May 2 – May 8, 2024 print edition of The Two River Times.
