Shore schools: NJ shortchanging us on state aid, and we'll fight for it

Crowded classrooms. Unfilled staff positions. Layoffs. Another year where overdue building repairs are put off once again.

This is Brick Township Public Schools, considered by the Department of Education to be wealthy and "overfunded" in terms of state aid. School officials paint a far different picture.

"We need a tremendous amount of work on our facilities at this point," said Acting Superintendent Dennis Filippone, whose district is replete with aging infrastructure.

Schools throughout the Jersey Shore are waiting for news from Trenton that could make or break their spending plans for the coming school year. Lakewood, Toms River, Red Bank and Freehold Borough, among other districts, face fiscal hardship.

With the deadline looming for each district to finalize their budgets, state lawmakers are discussing revamping the system that supports each school, creating an enduring limbo.

Budgets are lean, but could become leaner still in a handful of school districts that some Trenton officials consider overly reliant on state funds.

Administrators in Brick are worried.

Schools here will lay off 18 paraprofessionals and leave dozens of open positions unfilled by the start of the coming school year, said Filippone. School taxes are set to rise more than 4 percent this year, a $138 increase for the average Brick homeowner. Classrooms in some of their district's elementary schools already average 25 students per grade, and could become more crowded in the future.

"You have to have a good environment for kids to be able to achieve," said Filippone. "It's my opinion that we're suffering from a (state) funding formula that at its core (is) a good one. … Our problem really is that we're considered a wealthy district."

Fight for limited funds

School districts across New Jersey are locked in a tug of war over the distribution of state aid. Between 2009 and 2018, the total amount of money needed to run Garden State public schools adequately rose 27 percent, according to the Newark-based Education Law Center.

Local taxpayers have shouldered much of that burden; local school tax levies rose 24 percent over that time, according to the law center. But state aid from Trenton didn't keep pace, rising only 7 percent over the same decade, according to the law center.

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Some lawmakers, lead by state Senate President Stephen M. Sweeney, want school aid redistributed so it better reflects demographic and population changes in communities over the past decade.

New Education Commissioner Lamont Repollet told lawmakers earlier this year that he would consider shifting state money from "overfunded" districts — ones like Brick and Toms River, where student populations have declined — to underfunded districts with growing student populations.

School districts like Freehold Borough, where the population growth has outpaced the district's ability to raise taxes, would benefit from such a plan.

“The reason that the underfunded districts are so persistent (in pushing for this change) is that we need this money for our students, and not getting this money is just really very unfair," said Freehold Borough Superintendent Rocco Tomazic.

Tomazic was upset earlier this year when he learned his district would in fact receive less state aid than last year

“We never thought we’d go backwards," he said.

Red Bank school officials are just as dissatisfied.

For years, due to rising enrollment coupled with stagnant state aid, the K-8 district has perennially ranked among the most underfunded in New Jersey, along with Freehold Borough.

Last year was a different story. When the smoke from the state budget battle finally cleared, Red Bank wound up getting a nearly $513,000 boost in state aid, an unexpected windfall that helped pay for some new teachers and other instructional upgrades.

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That outcome made this year’s allocation doubly disappointing. While Red Bank saw a slight rise of $178,503, that 5 percent bump was more than offset by an additional $184,588 the district must pay to fund the Red Bank Charter School.

As it stands, next year’s $22 million budget plan calls for the elimination of five staff positions, along with cuts to after-school programs like the cross country team and the jazz band. Even then, the owner of the average assessed home ($366,505) will see his or her local school tax bill rise $117 next year, to $3,023.

But after so many years of being short-shrifted, Schools Superintendent Jared J. Rumage says this year’s cuts are just “the tip of the iceberg.”

“It’s not about what we have to cut at this point. It’s what we haven’t been able to add,” he said, citing a critical need for additional ESL and special education teachers, guidance counselors and speech therapists.

With all that said, though, Rumage is still holding out hope that the Murphy administration with reconsider its school spending for this year to address the inherent inequities for districts like Red Bank and Freehold Borough.

“We’re cautiously optimistic,” Rumage said. “I think we’re being heard.”

School funding is a problem playing out across Ocean and Monmouth counties.

In Lakewood, a $28 million budget hole and arguments over school spending lead parents to take over a Board of Education meeting on Monday night.

In Brick and Toms River, administrators are contacting lawmakers in Trenton and the new governor.

Defining wealth, and why it matters

Brick and Toms River are both considered "wealthy" school districts by the Department of Education, but officials in both districts say this is a misconception.

Officials in both districts say other municipalities are making their tax bases look smaller on paper than they really are, hiding property from the tax roles through Payment in Lieu of Taxes, or PILOT, programs.

Brick and Toms River school officials also say their more recent tax evaluations stand in contrast to towns that have not re-evaluated their properties in decades. That leaves both townships looking wealthy compared with municipalities with years-old property evaluations, they argue.

Toms River Superintendent David Healy said these are "critical flaws" in the way the Department of Education calculates state aid to schools.

Brick schools Business Administrator James Edwards argues that the district's $116.7 million budget is actually nearly $11.5 million short of what the state defines as an "adequate" budget for its size and makeup.

The average New Jersey public school student cost taxpayers $15,714 in the 2016-17 school year, yet Brick students cost $1,562 less to educate, according to state Department of Education records. Toms River's costs were even lower, at $12,855 per pupil, nearly $3,000 less than the state average, according to DOE records.

“Don’t penalize districts for doing it right, reward us," said Healy, Toms River's superintendent. “You have to reward those districts that are doing it right.”

Healy said the district is run efficiently, but that the town's ability to raise school taxes is still limited by a tax base reduced by superstorm Sandy.

In Toms River, the school board passed a resolution last month highlighting what it said were failures of the funding formula and urging Gov. Phil Murphy to revise the calculations.

“The well for Toms River is dry," Healy said.

In Brick, the budget is also stretched thin. Eighteen classroom paraprofessionals are set to lose their jobs before September. School administrators will leave dozens of other open positions unfilled. New computers and security cameras for the district's fleet of buses will have to wait.

"We're cutting corners. We're cutting programs. We're delaying projects we need to do," said Brick school board president Stephanie Wohlrab. "The kids end up suffering."

Filippone, Edwards and Wohlrab plan to plead their case Wednesday before the state Board of Education in Trenton. They fear without pressure in Trenton, lawmakers may again target this district and its suburban neighbors for cuts.

Last year, Brick, Toms River and Middletown faced about $6.7 million in state aid cuts collectively from lawmakers. It was months of pressure and pleas that finally averted most of the budget reductions.

"How do you tell a low-spending district that they have to spend less?" Edwards said.

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Brick's Board of Education voted to raise school taxes here by 4.3 percent, but that will not be enough to cover some important investments, they said. In November, they will put another spending plan before voters, a referendum for $12.5 million in school security upgrades and safety projects that educators say are a necessity following a string of recent deadly school shootings.

That referendum, if approved, would cost the average homeowner here about $11 a year for the next 25 years.

"The bottom line is our kids deserve to have an opportunity to have the best education possible in this community," said Filippone, the acting Brick superintendent.

"There's a document that the superintendent (in every district) has to sign that goes along … with the budget, and it basically certifies that we're able to provide a thorough and efficient education," he said. "I signed it, and I believe it, because of the people that we have here, not because of the (small amount of) money that we spend on our students. They deserve better."

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Amanda Oglesby: @OglesbyAPP: 732-557-5701; aoglesby@gannett.com