NJ Education Report

NJ Assemblyman John Burzichelli is all hot under the collar because Gov. Christie didn’t follow through on legislation passed during the Corzine Administration that would require local school districts to consider consolidation. Mr. Burzichelli fulminates in a press release issued today, “[a] 2007 law required the executive county superintendents to present by March 2010 a plan to regionalize and consolidate schools within their districts. Despite this being law, we have seen no progress on this plan, much to the detriment of taxpayers. The Christie administration needs to do better. “

He adds, “After all, the governor claims his proposed budget increasing school aid by $1.12 billion, but this is merely spin. Direct aid to districts is nearly $112 million less compared to before Gov. Christie took office.”

Let’s take a closer look, first at the consolidation section of the Assemblyman’s complaint (and you can also check out my piece two weeks ago for WHYY’s Newsworks. Plus the Asbury Park Press has an article today regarding the same issue).

Back in 2006 the Statehouse, in a fruitless exercise of hope over experience, passed legislation called 18A that created a new position called Executive County Superintendent, one for each county. The mission of these newly-enthroned ECS’s was this:

No later than three years following the effective date of sections 42 to 58 of P.L.2007, c.63 (C.18A:7-11 et al.), (the Executive County Superintendent will) recommend to the commissioner a school district consolidation plan to eliminate all districts, other than county-based districts and other than preschool or kindergarten through grade 12 districts in the county, through the establishment or enlargement of regional school districts.

In other words, each newly-appointed ECS must create a proposal to eliminate all non-K-12 districts by merging them with others. Deadline: March 10th, 2010.

So how’d that work? It didn’t. Certainly the opposition of both NJEA and NJSBA was a factor, but the obstacles ran deeper. The law had no teeth: it couldn’t order consolidation but only recommend it, even for tiny and inefficient districts.

The legislation was flawed in other ways: districts had to shell out their own money for required feasibility studies; the proposed consolidation (it never got that far) would go before voters of all involved districts and one town could veto the whole megillah (which it would, since at least one district’s taxes would go up).

March 2010 came and went, and at the end of May 2010 then-Education Commissioner Bret Schundler announced that the initiative was on hold until the Legislature was willing to fund studies about the financial and education implications of the (not so) new law.

So why has Assemblyman Burzichelli got his panties in a twist when he knows the sad history of this well-intentioned bill? It’s a nifty, if ironic, segue into his real concern, the newly-released report from the Office of Legislative Services mellifluously entitled, “How Proposed Changes to the School Funding Reform Act of 2008 Will Change the Allocation of State Aid,” or “The Rationale for Shifting Money Away from Abbott Districts.” The 2006 legislation to consolidate school districts was offered in the spirit of finding economies of scale. The OLS report is offered in the spirit of explaining how the State is going to allocate its 2013 state school aid of $11.743 billion. Sometimes we don’t seem to getting very far at all.