School aid plan adds at least 2% for every district

Corzine expected to discuss details today

Star Ledger - Wednesday, December 12, 2007 BY DUNSTAN McNICHOL

Gov. Jon Corzine's long-awaited plan for handing out more than $8 billion in state school aid will include a boost of at least 2 percent for every community, according to people briefed on the new plan.

Two weeks after revealing the framework for his new funding program, Corzine today is scheduled to offer a district-by-district breakdown of where the money will flow under his retooled system.

Corzine has said publicly that up to two-thirds of the state's 618 school districts will see a marked increase in aid under his plan. At the urging of lawmakers, he also has agreed to add a 2 percent sweetener for the 200 or so communities that would otherwise lose funds under the new formula, according to lawmakers and lobbyists briefed by administration officials. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the details were not yet public.

Corzine will publicly unveil them this afternoon at an elementary school in Burlington Township. Before and after that, he'll be personally briefing legislators, representatives of school districts and other interested parties at the governor's mansion in Princeton.

For lawmakers hoping to vote on the new school funding plan before Jan. 8, when the current legislative session ends, today's presentation can be boiled down to four words: "Show me the money."

But even across-the-board increases in state aid will do little to mollify critics of Corzine's new funding approach. They claim this year's supplemental aid will only mask the impact of a formula that will ultimately sap aid from the state's poorest and wealthiest communities to bolster middle-income communities.

"It would be nice to see what would happen after the first year -- who will lose money," said David Sciarra, executive director of the Education Law Center, a Newark nonprofit that has pressed the long-running Abbott vs. Burke lawsuit. To comply with state Supreme Court rulings in that case, the state sends more than half its school aid to 31 "special needs" districts in mostly urban areas.

Corzine's plan seeks to break away from the focus on specific districts and instead direct aid based on the needs of students. It would set new guidelines for "adequate" per-pupil spending, and provide higher funding for districts with large concentrations of students from low-income families or with limited English skills.

The governor's proposal also includes the first substantial changes in decades to the way the state hands out about $1 billion in special education aid.

Corzine plans to focus two-thirds of that funding on the state's poorer communities -- a prospect that concerns wealthy towns, which currently get special education aid based solely on the number of special needs students they enroll and the costs they incur for educating them.

Separately yesterday, a state appeals court granted Sciarra access to background materials that state officials used to develop the school funding proposal, and chided the state for its secrecy.

"The desire to withhold the document at this time bespeaks a lack of confidence in the ability of our citizens to digest and analyze the potential consequences of the choices the State must make," the court wrote.

Yesterday Corzine dismissed such criticism, saying the process of devising the new funding formula has played out in public and private for more than a year.

"There's not a given Legislature that has ever been more exposed to this topic than this group," he said yesterday. "They haven't seen the numbers because we didn't have all the different population numbers. We have those, we're cranking them out."

Christopher Manno, superintendent of schools in Burlington Township, said he was resisting the temptation to assume that the selection of his community for the governor's announcement portends a generous increase in state aid for him.

But a state consultant's report released last year showed that Burlington was spending 14 percent below what experts deemed would be needed to adequately fund the community's schools.

"Certainly, as every district, we would be very pleased if the support would be increased," said Manno.

Dunstan McNichol may be reached at dmcnichol@starledger.com or (609) 989-0341.

EDUCATION WEEK: N.J. Governor Seeks to Overhaul School Financing

New Jersey’s governor has proposed a controversial school finance formula that would eliminate the special-needs-district designation that has brought billions of dollars in extra assistance to the state’s poorest urban school systems.

The plan , released Nov. 30, suggests adopting a statewide formula that is designed to gear aid to the relative needs of students and their communities’ ability to pay for their education. Currently, New Jersey policymakers adjust school funding for some districts based on enrollment growth, and for others by specific need, without any overarching formula applied to all 616 of the state’s districts.

The state’s poorest 31 urban districts get money through a unique calculation generated by a long-running state supreme court case called Abbott v. Burke. It guarantees them funding on a par with the state’s wealthiest districts, and additional money for facilities and a broad array of programs such as universal preschool.

Gov. Jon S. Corzine, a Democrat, wants a new funding method in place for the 2008-09 school year, but some education activists were skeptical that could happen, since the state budget must be signed by June 30.

Any new system must pass the state legislature, which took a year to finalize the last school-funding formula in the mid-1990s, only to see it declared unconstitutional for the poorest districts and, later, not fully funded or implemented for the rest. Gov. Corzine and top education leaders also want the state supreme court to review the plan to ensure that it meets the equity aims of the 26-year-old Abbott case.

Few Specifics Yet

The governor hopes the legislature will approve his plan before Jan. 8, when a new session begins with dozens of new members. But some advocates argue that lawmakers should not rush approval of such a complex and important matter.

“It’s unreasonable to expect something this complicated to come together with any degree of comfort that fast,” said Lynne Strickland, the executive director of the Garden State Coalition of Schools, which advocates for the interests of middle- and upper-income school districts.

The governor’s funding proposal comes amid years of debate about how to address inequities in school spending in a state known for its heavy spending on education while also lowering its highest-in-the-nation property taxes. A special legislative committee recommended an overhaul of New Jersey’s funding methods a year ago. ("N.J. Panel Eyes Changes in School Funding," Nov. 29, 2006.)

Gov. Corzine’s proposal contained no district-by-district dollar figures, leaving local officials uncertain of how they would fare under the new formula. But those figures were expected as early as this week.

The governor has pledged about $450 million more annually to meet the needs of the state’s 1.4 million students under his new plan, which would represent about a 4 percent hike over this fiscal year’s $11 billion appropriation.

Some activists wonder whether that would be enough to keep Abbott programs intact and extend help to additional places in need. They also note that the state is in a tough funding spot: with an annual budget of $33.5 billion, it is projecting a shortfall of $3 billion for fiscal 2009.

The proposal envisions no special-needs designation for any subset of districts, such as the Abbott districts, or another, low-income group that also gets targeted funding. Instead, it adopts a commonly used statewide approach that establishes the same base cost in each district for regular education at the elementary, middle, and high school levels, and adds “weights”—additional dollars—for low-income, special education, English-learner and other high-need students, regardless of what kind of district they live in.

Districts would get additional money for each child in those categories, plus extra funds per child on a sliding scale once their portion of low-income children reaches a certain level. In that way, the new formula can account for changing demographics and address concentrations of need wherever they arise, in Abbott districts or elsewhere, said Commissioner of Education Lucille E. Davy.

“This is not an attempt to undermine or walk away from what the court attempted to accomplish,” she said in an interview last week. She noted that the governor’s plan expands the Abbott districts’ universal preschool program to scores of additional low-income, non-Abbott districts.

District-level Concerns

David G. Sciarra, the lawyer who represents the plaintiff schoolchildren in the Abbott case, said the funding proposal ignores the New Jersey Supreme Court’s finding that districts serving poor, urban children should be able to spend what the richest districts spend for added programs and services to offset the effects of poverty. Base funding amounts being discussed at the education department, he said, would mean that many Abbott districts would get amounts closer to the state average than to the levels of the wealthiest districts.

Ms. Strickland said she welcomes a unified approach to school finance in New Jersey, but worries about other aspects of the new proposal.

The districts she represents object to a change that would require wealthier districts to shoulder a greater portion of their special education costs, she said. New Jersey has a particularly large share of students with autism. She said her member districts could see their property taxes rise even higher to pay for special education.

Marie S. Bilik, the executive director of the New Jersey School Boards Association, said the funding proposal does nothing to solve the biggest underlying problem in education: heavy dependence on local property taxes, which places the biggest burden on low- and middle- income homeowners. The association believes the state should pay for a greater portion of total school costs—it now shoulders about 37 percent—and should substitute income taxes for a portion of property taxes as a source of school funding.

Vol. 27, Issue 15, Pages 14,17