TOMS RIVER, NJ—Ocean County school districts are being hit hard by New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy’s flawed S2 funding formula, which froze funding for services such as ESL programs and school transportation fees. The governor has only offered one suggestion to those districts.
Start shutting down schools.
To avert a school crisis, Toms River sought to expand its regional school district to include Seaside Heights. That move would have boosted the district’s total enrollment, but it was defeated in a ballot referendum on Tuesday.
Murphy has ignored requests from local leaders to fix the flawed S2 funding formula. Schools in Jackson and Toms River are especially hard hit by lower enrollment due to growing private school enrollment, state-mandated private school transportation costs, and the state’s refusal to use current English as a Second Language (ESL) enrollment figures to determine school funding.
For decades, Toms River has had three high schools: Toms River North, Toms River South, and Toms River East. Those schools saw the population grow from about 60,000 to nearly 100,000. Governor Murphy now says Toms River and other districts losing state aid should just start closing their schools.
This comes after the governor touted that ‘No schools should close’ in New Jersey. In Toms River, this would also mean closing one of its three intermediate schools.
Murphy admitted in an interview that Toms River’s school district is being penalized because it lacks a large industry and a dense population, whatever that means.
He said, “Communities that don’t have large industries, large corporations, or a high population of homeowners.”
In essence, Toms River stayed suburban and kept overpopulation and over-urbanization in check, in favor for a more green, and environmentally friendly growth plan…and it’s being penalized for it.
All the town has to do is allow a few factories, an urban center, some mega-warehouse sites, and row housing, and the problem might fix itself.
Closing those schools would increase class sizes in the remaining schools by as much as 25% and would cost hundreds of teaching jobs.
Murphy blamed the Toms River School District’s financial woes on former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, saying Christie underfunded education in New Jersey by $9 billion. Now funding across the state is up, but school districts in rural and suburban communities like Toms River and Jackson Township are facing devastating aid cuts each year since Murphy ‘fixed’ the school funding formula.