The governor is set to soon roll out the particulars of a new school funding formula that will seek to rework the way that state aid is doled out to local school districts.
Under the current model, the state determines who gets how much aid depending on the location of the district in question, with more affluent areas receiving less than the poorer ones.
The new model that Gov. Corzine is proposing shifts the focus from where the school is, to who is inside of it. If the new funding proposal is approved, state aid will be distributed depending on how many students are in the school, with extra funds released depending on how many of those students are at risk or possess limited English proficiency. There are several other aspects to this proposal affecting state funding, but they all share the characteristic of being centered on the students in and of themselves rather than where the district happens to be located.
Corzine believes that this will return balance to what he, and others, feels has become an unfair situation regarding the distribution of school aid.
It is the governor’s hope that his proposal’s passage will also mean muchneeded property tax relief to New Jersey residents, the logic being that more state aid means less need to increase local tax levies because districts will be more capable of funding themselves without relying as much on local property taxes.
Even if the governor’s proposal makes it through, this probably will not happen.
The first thing to consider is that while state aid might go up, other things, such as pensions, utilities’ costs and health coverage, will rise with it and that the best, even under this new plan, a district can accomplish is to pare down the budget to account only for these uncontrollable increases.
A second thing to consider is that some districts could see an increase in state aid figures not as a pressure valve to safely control tax levies but as an invitation to accelerate spending. Some of the things the district would spend this additional money on could well be good and worthwhile things that genuinely advance the education of our state’s young people and, if this were the case, that money would have been spent appropriately. But regardless of whether additional funds are spent on worthwhile endeavors or expensive wastes of public money, that tax bill isn’t going down anytime soon, regardless of how much state aid is coming in.
Thus, while the goal of sending more state money to local school districts in the interests of relieving the property tax burden on New Jersey residents is a laudable one, the most it can hope to do is cause tax levies to not increase as much and that’s if we’re lucky.
What’s needed is a fundamental change to the way that the state funds and organizes its schools and the only way to do that is through a constitutional amendment. The system must be reworked from the ground up.