STAR LEDGER Corzine adds school aid to the lame-duck agenda

Advocates and legislators surprised by ambitious plan  BY DEBORAH HOWLETT  Thurs, Sept 13, 2007

Gov. Jon Corzine said yesterday he wants lawmakers in the next four months to completely revamp the way New Jersey pays for public education.

"You will find that before the end of the year, we'll have an energy master plan, an anti-crime plan, and you'll see -- I'm less cer tain, but optimistic about -- a school funding formula," Corzine said. "All of those things are coming together."

The promise to accelerate the debate on state financing of public schools was greeted with surprise from school advocates and legislative leaders alike.

"A new school funding formula is no easy task," said Lynne Strickland of the Garden State Coalition of Schools. "This sounds like he's setting up a scenario where (his plan) will be force-fed down the Legislature's throat and the pub lic's."

Assembly Speaker Joseph Roberts said Corzine is "correct" to aim for the end of the year. But, he said, "We need to ensure sufficient debate and local input."

Aides to Corzine acknowledged later that the governor has not yet come up with a proposal. The Department of Education is in the process of drafting a plan, but it is unlikely to be ready until November.

The governor's to-do list seems to be growing weekly.

Corzine vowed last week to take up strict new ethics reform immediately after the election. The month before that, in response to the schoolyard shootings in Newark, he asked the Attorney General's Office to draft the anti-crime bill. Lawmakers also left several other key issues on the table when they recessed in June, including abolition of the state's death penalty.

"There's a lot on that plate," Senate President Richard Codey said. "It's a pretty heavy lift."

Legislators are not scheduled to convene in Trenton until after the Nov. 6 election. All 120 seats in the Legislature are on the ballot, and then lawmakers will have a two- month lame-duck session over the holidays before the new Legislature is seated.

Corzine laid out the ambitious agenda in response to a question after a bill-signing ceremony about whether his effort over the summer to come up with an "asset moneti zation" plan for leasing the state's toll roads has created a bottleneck in his administration on other mat ters.

"We have more than enough on our agenda. We are hard at work on it. I think the public will see re sults," Corzine said.

The state last refigured its school funding formula in 1994. Then, it took 12 full months of debate to come up with a formula that takes into account aggregate property value and income to quantify the relative wealth of a school district and determine the state's contribution to each of New Jersey's more than 600 school district.

Strickland said the administration has been leaning toward a plan in which funding is based on the students rather than the district, but that has merely been a broad outline.

"There is no plan in place, and this process seems to indicate a lightweight debate," she said. "We want this to happen, but we're very concerned about such a timeline."

David Sciarra, director of the Education Law Center representing 31 impoverished school districts, said those so-called "Abbott schools" would likely see significant changes in funding under a new formula, and those changes de serve careful consideration.

"A short session like lame duck is not an appropriate vehicle in which to consider something as complex and important as a new school funding formula." Sciarra said. "The point is not to do it fast but to do it right."

Staff writer John Mooney contributed to this report.