NJ has released 2024 school funding figures. See how much will go to your district

New Jersey’s public schools are closer to being “fully funded” by the state than they have been in years, some experts said after the state Department of Education released its 2024 aid figures to school districts on Thursday.

The state added $832 million to its funding for K-12 public schools, benefiting all counties except three: Monmouth, Ocean and Cape May.

For the first time in years, Sussex County saw a gain of 2.2% in state aid, unlike last year, when it dropped by 7.4%. Somerset County saw the biggest increase, with 18%. Morris County is at 16%, followed by Bergen County at 13%. Passaic County saw an increase in aid of 7.6%.

Newark received the largest increase, with $114 million more in aid, followed by Elizabeth, with an increase of $46 million, and Paterson, which received $34 million more.

Public schools receive annual funding from the state, but despite New Jersey’s national reputation for high-quality suburban schools, the state has never prioritized fully funding its schools according to its aid formula set in law. This year's increase puts the Murphy administration closer to its goal of fully funding the state’s public schools by 2025.

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"There was no sort of concerted effort to fully fund the formula," said Danielle Farrie of the Education Law Center, an advocacy group for students in the state’s most vulnerable districts, referring to former Gov. Chris Christie's administration and the fallout of the recession in 2008.

“The increase this year is actually significant and probably more than we would have expected … but we're certainly glad to see that the administration is staying faithful to the formula and, it seems, implementing it as it is supposed to be,” she said.

The increase in the budget is likely “largely due to inflationary pressures, which have caused the cost of education to increase,” Farrie said. Inflation accounted for the “sizable increase” in the budget, “to help schools to keep up with rising costs,” according to Murphy’s budget presented on Tuesday to lawmakers.

This is the sixth year of a seven-year plan to fund schools based on amendments to the School Funding Reform Act pushed by Democrats in 2018.

“I believe every district is going to be very close to 100% funding next year," said independent education finance blogger Jeffrey Bennett. "Phil Murphy’s state aid history has been so much better than I thought it would be seven years ago.”

Murphy has been following the formula “to the letter,” said Bennett, a longtime watcher of how schools are funded in New Jersey. He said the state’s method of distributing aid to districts is “very fair,” because it is calculated according to a district’s percentage of the total statewide deficit.

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But many districts that have lost funding say aid is not being distributed fairly because of changes to the formula made in 2018 that corrected historical imbalances in the calculations.

“I don’t think it’s a fair funding formula for districts that are losing money. I want more money per student for our taxpayers, who take care of 80% of our budget. That doesn’t seem right,” said Superintendent Craig Hutcheson of Sussex County’s Kittatinny Regional High School, which saw a drop of around $620,000 in aid for this coming year.

Falling enrollment has contributed to funding losses in rural districts like Kittatinny Regional. The funding formula should be “revisited,” Hutcheson said. Enrollment drops of 31% in the last 10 years at his school do not justify the nearly 60% state aid cuts his district has faced, he said. In 2022, mostly rural Sussex County saw the largest drop in enrollment statewide since 2009, at around 29%.

The current version of the funding formula has had “so many unforeseen and damaging circumstances," and for a third of the school districts in New Jersey, Hutcheson said, he finds "it curious and unfortunate that it’s not been revisited.” Enrollment drops can affect state aid, forcing affected schools to rethink how to continue operating their buildings and offering programs while serving fewer children.

The school funding formula is usually reviewed every three years, Farrie said.

Changes made under the Murphy administration phased out a category of funding called “hold harmless” aid to some districts. Losing this money hurts school districts that saw state aid cuts because of overfunding in the past, but where local taxes do not raise enough revenue for them to meet “adequacy.”

“We are always concerned about state aid cuts in school districts that are currently funding below their adequacy level and that we shouldn't be cutting districts so that they fall even further behind,” Farrie said.

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She was referring to districts such as Brick and Toms River, which have filed a lawsuit, and Freehold Regional, Jackson, Lacey and Manalapan-Englishtown, which are asking the state to release its methodology for funding, after drops in state aid.

In early January 2021, a judge ordered the state Department of Education to turn over codes and formulas used to determine how state aid is distributed to the six districts, but the districts were not satisfied with the information.

“We disagree that the state has met its obligation with what they turned over,” said Charles Sampson, superintendent of Freehold Regional High School. The schools say they plan to file a motion saying they “still cannot make sense of the way they have provided the data,” Sampson said.

Murphy’s budget offers $20 million in stabilization aid, a tranche of money available to help districts that are seeing a reduction in state aid or “are otherwise facing a budgetary imbalance,” according to the governor’s office.

A bill that would set up a task force to reexamine the funding formula has passed the Senate, said its sponsor, Sen. Vin Gopal, D-Monmouth, chair of the Education Committee. It has yet to get a hearing in the Assembly.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: NJ schools state aid: Check out funding from 2024 budget