West Windsor-Plainsboro school district officials did not get too excited when they first learned in December the district might see a 10 percent increase in the amount of funding it received from the state.
Now, they say, the extra funding will actually end up slightly hurting next year’s budget. The first public discussion of that budget will take place at the board’s meeting on Tuesday, January 22.
In December Governor Jon Corzine announced the release of the new state school funding formula, which calls for approximately $7.8 billion to be distributed for K-12 education around the state, or an increase of approximately $530 million, beginning with the 2008-’09 school year. After years of being flat-funded, WW-P schools would see state aid go from $10,”504,”000 to $11,”554,”000 — an increase of $1,”050,”000. However, with the legislative bill signed into law on the last day of the legislature’s lame-duck session, also come some limits.
Under the new formula, all districts would receive a state aid increase of at least 2 percent during the first year, and no districts would see a decrease in total state aid during the first three years of the program, a press release from the governor’s office stated. In later years, decreases in aid would occur if districts experience declines in overall enrollment or in enrollment categories, it added.
Schools around the state had been calling on the department to come up with a solution to the funding problem, as many suggested the current formula was not taking into account demographic shifts and population increases, and was creating hardship to middle-class and wealthier districts by unfairly shifting a majority of the state aid to just 32 districts classified as Abbott, or poorer urban or special needs districts.
The state Department of Education has been working on the new formula for the past five years. “In May of 2006, the Department informed the court that the creation of a new funding formula was a Departmental priority and that it was committed to develop a funding formula that would meet the needs of all students and would address the inequities that had resulted from the imbalance of increased funding targeted primarily to Abbott districts,” the report accompanying the new formula states. The report also mentions that since 2002 — the last year in which demographic data from each district was used in calculating the current formula — “many districts have experienced significant demographic shifts that have not been accounted for or reflected in the distribution of state aid.”
WW-P Assistant Superintendent of Finance Larry Shanok said aid to the district had been frozen for a number of years until last year when it, along with other districts in the area, received an increase of only 3 percent. “We experienced a lot of growth in recent years, too. It was disappointing.”
Between 2000 and 2007, Shanok said the district saw an enrollment increase of about 16 percent. When the new formula was initially released last month, Shanok warned there “were a lot of unknowns at this point” and that he wasn’t clear whether the entire $1,”050,”000 will be sent to the district, or whether the money will be restricted for use in certain areas of the budget.
During the school board meeting on January 8, Shanok announced, however, that districts with 10 percent increase will have to apply 3/4 of the increase to the tax levy, which helps taxpayers, but actually provides little new funding for the actual schools.
“We keep hoping we’re wrong, but it seems to be embedded in the legislation worse than that, such that with last year’s legislation, our general fund tax levy will be limited to a 4 percent increase, and while we have gotten a little over a million dollars, which they call new dollars of state aid, three quarters of it has to go for tax reduction,” Shanok said. “Only a quarter of it can actually be spent by us in the coming year.”
“And then on top of that,” he continued, “as we read the legislation at this point, the actual additional state aid used for tax relief has to be subtracted from the 4-percent cap. In effect it’s to give us less money than if the state had frozen state aid and not bothered with what they’ve done.”
“In terms of our increase to our general tax levy, we will be restricted to under 4 percent,” he said.
