Court Orders More Funding for Poorer School Districts

School officials from around the state are waiting to see how Gov.
Chris Christie and state lawmakers comply with a state supreme court
decision Tuesday ordering the state to provide $500 million more in
funding to poorer school districts.

By a 3-2 vote, the court ordered the state to fully fund the School
Funding Reform Act, as it applies to 31 districts with a high
percentage of "disadvantaged" students. Those districts include Orange, Newark, East Orange, Irvington, and Paterson.

That law, adopted in 2008, promised to provide school districts throughout New Jersey with enough money to enable their students to achieve the "thorough and efficient" education promised in the New Jersey state constitution.

But in the 2011 budget proposed by Gov. Chris Christie and adopted by
the legislature, SFRA was under-funded by almost $1.6 billion,
according to the court's calculations. The governor and lawmakers said
they had no choice, given the state's $11 billion budget deficit.

But a majority of the justices rejected that argument. Now the
governor and lawmakers must decide where to find the extra $500
million, including the possibility of re-allocating school funds to
take money away from wealthier districts and move it to districts
where students have poorer performance.

The governor and lawmakers each blamed the other Tuesday afternoon for
the court ruling. While agreeing to abide by the court decision, Gov.
Christie said it would be up to the legislature to figure out how to
come up with the money. Democratic lawmakers blamed the governor for
submitting the initial school budget and said the governor had
"brought the courts back into New Jersey education," in the words of
State Senate President Steve Sweeney, D-Gloucester.

At the center of the debate is the supreme court's 1985 decision in
Abbott v. Burke, in which it ruled that the New Jersey constitution
requires the state to provide a "thorough and efficient system of free
public schools." The justices found that the state was not meeting
that burden and ordered lawmakers to develop a plan for doing so,
emphasizing the need to provide both an amount of funding and
predictable funding. In several decisions in intervening years, the
court and state officials battled over various plans to comply with
the justices' order, until 2008, when the legislature passed the
School Funding Reform Act (SFRA). The state asked the court to approve
SFRA as meeting the constitutional requirement to provide a quality
education. The court agreed to give the state a chance to prove that
SFRA would work, although insisting it be reviewed in three years.

In her majority opinion, Justice Jaynee LaVecchia wrote that the court
made it clear in ruling on the 2008 law that it would only meet the
court's approval if full funding was provided for the so-called Abbott
districts. She cited the court's language that, "Our finding of
constitutionality is premised on the expectation that the State will
continue to provide school funding aid during this and the next two
years at the levels required by SFRA’s formula each year."

She concluded, "Regrettably, the State did not honor its commitment."

Tuesday's ruling does not require the state to fully fund the SFRA,
but rather only to provide full funding to the Abbott districts, which
include school systems in poor towns such as Newark, Hoboken, Camden
and Paterson.

The Newark-based Education Law Center filed suit against the state
after the 2011 budget was passed, arguing that the state was required
to fully fund SFRA. The state countered that it did not have enough
money to fully fund the law, and also argued that the amount of money
provided in the 2011 budget was sufficient to allow school districts
to meet the constitutional requirement of a "thorough and efficient"
education. The supreme court appointed a judge known as a special
master to hear evidence on that argument. The special master, Judge
Peter E. Doyne, reported in March that after hearing testimony from
school superintendents in both rich and poor districts, he concluded
that school systems were being forced to layoff teachers and cut back
programs, and that in the poorer Abbott districts, less money meant
that students there would get a poorer education.

That set the stage for Tuesday's ruling.

How Gov. Christie and state lawmakers will respond is not clear. A new
revenue forecast for state tax collections predicts that the state may
take in between $500 and $900 million more than anticipated. That
money could be used to comply with the court's order, but the governor
has already said he would like to use at least some of it to provide
property tax relief. Alternatively, he and state lawmakers could make
further re-allocations of existing state school funding to shift more
money to the Abbott districts, while also using some of the expanded
tax revenues.

Christie said today that the ruling is disappointing but not unexpected.

"The Court should not be dictating how taxpayer dollars are spent and prioritizing certain programs over others. The Supreme Court is not the Legislature; it should not dictate policy, it should not be in the business of discussing specific taxes to be raised and it should not have any business deciding how tax dollars are spent," he said. "A number of the members of the current Supreme Court agreed with that very position in today’s decision."