New School Aid Bill Will Bring Some Relief To South Brunswick District

SOUTH BRUNSWICK, NJ — Gov. Phil Murphy recently signed two bills as the solution for school districts facing steep cuts because of funding reductions.

For districts like South Brunswick, the bills will partially help cover the budget gap. It will also help the community as residents will see a minimum impact in taxes, followed by a decrease in the next year.

Bill A4161 provides $44.7 million in a Stabilized School Budget Aid Grant Program for grants of 45 percent of a school district’s state school aid cut for the upcoming school year. It also allows districts seeing aid cuts to increase their property tax levy by up to 9.9 percent — above the 2 percent cap under the School Funding Reform Act.

“This was a very important Bill for districts like South Brunswick who have seen drastic and consistent cuts for years. When you look at the impact of S2 combined with a 2 percent cap while trying to manage 7 percent inflation, the outcome has been a disaster for said school districts,” Superintendent Scott Feder told Patch.

For the 2024-25 school year, the district was allotted 14.2 million in state aid, a reduction of $1.4 million from the previous year.

The district was slated to cut 67 positions which include teachers and assistant principals.

But with aid coming from the new bills, South Brunswick will be able to "pull back on many of the cuts that were made,” Feder said. While some of the district's reductions were related to enrollment declines, many were related to budget loss.

“Another major area that will be impacted in the positive is fees. We had scheduled fee increases that we will not be able to pull back on. Also, we were planning to float a $1.85 million dollar second question that we can pull back almost all of that and now can afford these things without going to further increase taxes for our families,” Feder said.

Earlier the district was slated to lose 67 positions which include teachers and assistant principals.

But now, a good deal of the staffing impact can be reversed, Feder said.

Also, the fee increases previously suggested during the budget meeting will not occur (click here to see). However, the subscription busing program will remain.

“Our ultimate goal is to maintain reasonable class sizes, offer outstanding programs and ensure that everything we do is sustainable,” Feder told Patch.

The $170 million budget adopted by the district includes a general fund of $153 million, special revenue fund of $10 million, and $6.8 million in debt service.

But in the coming 2025-26 school year, the district will drop $5 million of its debt service, which will result in more tax savings for the residents.

Districts have been blasted by S2 advocates as not paying their fair share of property taxes to support their schools, the laws that had been in place left districts with no real mechanism to recapture the aid that was being cut.

They were governed by the 2 percent cap on property tax levy increases, and the option of putting a larger tax increase to voters in a referendum was unworkable because the earliest a referendum could be held was September — meaning if voters approved a property tax levy increase, it wouldn't take effect until well after the school year began, and after job and program cuts already had been made.

With S2 cuts usually far exceeding the 2 percent cap, districts have found themselves farther and farther in the hole of reaching what the education department has defined as "adequacy."

Adequacy is the amount the state education department says is the amount a district should be spending per pupil to provide that thorough and efficient education.

According to Feder the biggest positive of the new bill is sustainability. “We cannot continue down the path we were on every year figuring out what is going to be cut next. This Bill will allow us to plan strategically and focus on improvement, not survival,” Feder said.

“We moved away from thinking about doing the same with less, to thinking about how to imagine what is possible! This is key and one of the most important elements of the Bill.”

The school Superintendent thanked all involved in getting the bills passed. “We are excited to move back to the work of focusing on teaching and learning and not cuts and fees,” he said.

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