Lawmakers aim to help school districts facing state aid cuts

Assembly lawmakers unanimously approved two bills Friday that would aside grant funds and extend school budget deadlines for school districts facing state aid cuts under certain circumstances, legislators’ latest step to address steep swings in state aid levels seen in recent years.

One bill advanced by the Assembly Education Committee would appropriate $71.4 million in grant funds targeting the 140 school districts that will see aid cuts in the coming school year, a provision committee chair Assemblywoman Pam Lampitt (D-Camden) said would undo the latest round of cuts in most districts.

“There would be very few, maybe less than 20 school districts, that would still have a void in their funding,” she said. “Again, we’re trying to create a safety net. We’re not going to catch them all.”

The grants could return up to two-thirds of cut state aid to districts, and the bill would allow districts to exceed the state’s 2% cap on property tax levy hikes by leveraging portions of the cap that went unused in earlier years.

New Jersey has capped property tax levy growth to 2% annually since Gov. Chris Christie signed the limit into law in 2010. Under existing law, districts can carry forward the difference between the cap and enacted tax hikes, subject to certain restrictions, for up to three years.

The 2% cap has succeeded in slowing the growth of New Jersey’s highest-in the-nation property taxes, but school officials have increasingly viewed it as an albatross amid the outsized and unpredictable reductions to state aid seen in recent years.

In effect, some districts’ local share of school funding has grown faster than the tax cap would allow, leaving districts facing consecutive cuts further and further away from meeting their local fair share of funding.

Advocates welcomed the proposal, though they cautioned the bill would serve more as a stopgap solution than a permanent fix.

“You all have limited time and need to address this with a fairly — and I say this with respect — with a blunt instrument,” said Deborah Cornavaca, director of government relations for teachers union the New Jersey Education Association. “We’re not trying to figure out what each district needs. We’re trying to figure out a path forward and help the most districts maintain programming and staffing.”

Some school officials and advocates have called for greater tax cap flexibility to deal with large or consecutive cuts, but Lampitt appeared skeptical of such a proposal Friday. She said she worries blanket approval to exceed the 2% cap would create “schisms within the systems and within the school districts.”

Under Gov. Phil Murphy’s budget proposal, in the upcoming school year school districts are set to see reductions in state aid ranging from a $989 loss in West Wildwood to a $10.4 million cut in Long Branch. Most districts will receive state aid increases.

The other bill advanced Friday would allow schools to submit budgets in the five days after the state budget is signed into law — the budget signing is usually June 30 — avoiding an annual legislative limbo that sees school officials prepare budgets at breakneck speeds and, sometimes, with incomplete information.

Depending on the type of school district, school budgets are due in March or May, a timeline that advocates and school officials have said leaves too little time to budget for sharp swings in state aid.

“We heard from districts that May 15th was this critical date, that if they didn’t know by then what was going to happen, that they were going to have to lay off teachers. They were going to have to make those hard decisions,” Lampitt said.

The bill extending grant funds to districts facing aid cuts had no Senate companion as of Friday afternoon, though Senate lawmakers could introduce one Monday.

It’s unclear when the Senate Education Committee would hear either bill. The upper chamber panel had no meetings scheduled as of Friday.