JACKSON – School District and township officials, parents and residents feel New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, has put the Jackson Township school district in the position of having to sell a much-loved elementary school, in order to meet costs caused by the State’s S2 state aid funding formula cuts of the last seven years.
The Rosenauer Elementary School’s sale by the district would net approximately $8 million and would provide the troubled school district a one-time budgetary fix for its 2024 budget. The school district is facing a $25 million deficit in the 2024-25 school year, and according to officials, the board is powerless to close that gap without lowering the bar on educational quality provided to students.
The state feels this school underserves that portion of the township and the governor has been urging school districts to begin closing educational facilities noting some school buildings should be consolidated to accommodate students and cut costs.
The township has been hit hard since the S2 formula came into effect and school districts like Jackson and Plumsted that sought a loan for the state this year to maintain educational programs and staff were denied consideration despite the loss of millions of dollars in state aid.
State mandates that school districts are forced to cover include bussing for private school students who live within the school district and English as a Second Language (ESL) instruction for Hispanic speaking students.
Jackson administrators and Board President Giuseppe Palmeri have expressed that the district can’t live with cutting millions of dollars required to balance its $22.4 million in losses experienced.
Unless the governor and state legislature address the current funding deficit, school officials will force the sale of the elementary school. Jackson proved its case that it has not been fiscally irresponsible during prior Board meetings when even a state appointed fiscal monitor Carole Knopp-Morris, whose salary the school district is covering, and was ordered to oversee aspects of the district’s finances following last year’s budget loan request, said the district has a “revenue problem” and not a spending problem.
Despite repeated requests by the school district and by 12th Legislative District lawmakers no funds have been put toward restoring what Jackson has lost in state aid funding.
Assemblyman Alex Sauickie and other officials have noted that township taxpayers were apparently funding school projects in larger northern New Jersey based school districts such as Newark as well as southern jersey districts like Camden. Jackson is spending about $3,500 per student while Newark is spending around $30,000 per student.
School officials have expressed that they were looking for at least a short-term solution which could only be provided by the State Legislature and State Department of Education who caused the problem. The answer would be for those agencies to provide the district with grants, not loans, to close the deficit and to end the S-2 state aid school funding formula and create one that is transparent and equitable for all school districts.
Superintendent Nicole Pormilli said last month that some of the cuts that would need to be made to close the deficit included eliminating 27 more positions (bringing the total to 242 over the past seven years), increasing class sizes to 30 in the elementary schools and 35 to 40 in the middle schools and high schools, closing schools and she clarified that she was speaking in the plural tense), eliminating athletics altogether, cutting band, theater and clubs altogether, eliminating Air Force ROTC, eliminating courtesy busing, eliminating late buses, and foregoing any facilities improvements.
Selling the elementary school was an earlier voiced consideration that Pormilli said was something the district did not favor doing as it would create other issues such as transportation cost increases for the students who would be displaced by its closure.
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