School Funding – New Jersey

Posted on May 26, 2011 by townsend

• N.J. high court’s Abbott ruling means other school districts will still be short funding, By Jeanette Rundquist and Jessica Calefati, May 25, 2011, Star-Ledger: “Tuesday’s Supreme Court ruling means the state’s 31 poorest districts get to share $500 million in additional state aid.  But it also means some 550 districts will go without. ‘Once again, districts like Woodbridge and Piscataway have been left out in the cold,’ said John Crowe, the superintendent in Woodbridge. He said it is ‘disheartening to think a student who is born into poverty in Woodbridge somehow requires less assistance than a student born into poverty in another district.’ Crowe, along with other suburban superintendents, said Tuesday’s ruling short-changed their district despite the fact they, too, may educate at-risk children…”
• Tracing the history of rulings on school funding in poor N.J. cities, By Jeanette Rundquist, May 25, 2011, Star-Ledger: “In 1875, in an effort to get control of a patchwork public school system, the New Jersey state Legislature amended New Jersey’s constitution and made it the state’s responsibility to provide a ‘thorough and efficient system of free public schools.’ For more than 100 years since, the state’s courts and elected officials have wrestled with those eight words.  The participants and dollar amounts have changed over the years, but the issue has largely been the same: how to give children in New Jersey’s poorest cities the same level of education as those in its wealthiest communities.  The state Supreme Court took another stab at the issue Tuesday, ordering the state to increase school funding to poor districts by $500 million. Here is a look back at decisions leading up to Tuesday…”
• N.J. high court orders more school funding, By Rita Giordano, May 25, 2011, Philadelphia Inquirer: “New Jersey’s Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered the state to come up with $500 million more to aid certain poor and largely urban school districts next year, finding that the state did not enforce its own law or live up to promises made to the court. However, the justices, in their highly anticipated decision, declined to restore the full amount of the state’s aid shortfall – about $1.6 billion – that could have benefited many districts, including others with low-income children. The strongly worded, 3-2 ruling requires the additional funds for only the 31 former Abbott districts, which through more than two decades of corrective court orders had come to receive a large share of state aid. They still do, but the state funding formula, enacted under Gov. Jon S. Corzine, sought to spread money more evenly to other districts with poor children…”