To say Ilana Yares is highly invested in public education is an understatement. Not only is her spouse, Dr. Yoni Yares, a public school teacher, but their seven children will be students in Cherry Hill Public Schools until 2043.
However, investment is a source of frustration for Yares and her fellow school funding advocates. Part of the reason is due to a funding formula that has been alternatively called “opaque,” “confusing” and “outdated.”
For many New Jersey districts, the state provides a significant amount of their funding. In 2008, New Jersey legislators passed the School Funding Reform Act (SFRA), which laid out a complex formula to right-size school budgets.
The school funding formula
Back in 2008, each general education student was allocated $9,649 in funding. Following that base amount is a series of multipliers and weights based on a myriad of factors, such as students’ ages, special education or bilingual services, property weight values, income rate values, inflation and more. The result is confusing for district administrators and board of education members to follow and implement.
“The lack of transparency concerns me,” said Haddonfield Board of Education President Jaime Grookett. Grookett wants to see special education mandates come with funding, as well as regulation to rein in the higher cost of utilities and healthcare. Putting the cost burden on local taxpayers “forces longtime homeowners out of their home because the taxes are simply untenable,” Grookett said.
Parents like Yares feel the pain. “Our legislators don’t advocate for us the way they should. We are the largest district in southern New Jersey. And we don’t see the dividends from that because our representatives don’t fight for us.”
The legislators of LD-6, which covers most of Camden County and a portion of Burlington County, have a different view.
“Last year’s record $12.1 billion investment capped a seven-year effort to correct long-standing funding disparities,” said Assembly Majority Leader Louis D. Greenwald and Assemblywoman Melinda Kane. “We also recognize the funding formula, as with any program, requires regular oversight and updates.”
Possible solutions to the math problem
New Jersey legislators have worked incrementally to refine the funding formula. New Jersey Senate Bill 2 was enacted in 2018 to eliminate “adjustment aid” in an attempt to reduce the amount of overfunded districts.
“The existing formula…relies heavily on income data that trails over three years and is disproportionately impacted by high-income outliers—skewing the realities many of our communities face,” Assembly Majority Leader Greenwald and Assemblywoman Kane continued. Instead of using the current input of aggregate income, a fairer accounting would be to replace it with median income.
The state is creating some parts of the school funding formula based on data that is two or three years old. Another part of the formula, called the Geographic Cost Adjustment, hasn’t been updated since 2014.
Then, there is the timing problem. By the time the governor releases her budget numbers, there is very little time for school district administrators to build their budget. In some cases, business administrators have had merely hours to craft their budgets.
In addition, each fiscal year’s budget can have wild fluctuations. “You’re operating in the dark,” Haddonfield Superintendent of Schools Chuck Klaus said. “Things like Extraordinary Aid, one year you get 90% reimbursement, the next you get 45% reimbursement, and you can’t survive like that. You can’t build a budget like that.”
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