Julia Sass Rubin, Lisa Levine, and School Board members Molly Chrein and Andrea Spalla were among the participants at a Statehouse meeting organized by Save Our Schools last week “to highlight the $3.6 billion underfunding of public schools by the state since 2010, including $715 million in Governor Christie’s proposed 2013 State Budget.”
Governor Christie’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2013 budget also proposes changes to the school funding formula that would result in permanent funding cuts to districts that educate low income and non-English speaking students. These changes would mean a permanent reduction of more than $1 million for Princeton. The cuts will affect both the traditional public schools and the Princeton Charter School. Ms. Sass-Rubin said that this year’s budget has been unofficially dubbed “the reverse Robin Hood budget.”
Princeton Regional Schools believes that it has been underfunded by $1,689,548 in FY 2010; by $3,702,597 in FY 2011;Кand by $1,616,146 in 2012. Including proposed FY 2013 loss of $1,508,595, the total loss is $8,516,886.
Ms. Spalla reported that she spoke at last week’s event “not as a Board member, but as a private citizen. I felt that it is important for members of the press and the public to understand that the failure to fund schools at the levels set by law in the School Funding Reform Act affects all children around the state, including here in Princeton.”
“I don’t think people have a clue about how badly underfunded their schools are,” agreed Ms. Sass-Rubin several days after the event. “And they certainly don’t know about the budget cuts, which specifically target poor and immigrant children.”
The new budget, Ms. Rubin-Sass emphasized, would disproportionately affect low-income districts, and communities of color. She likened the governor’s change to the funding formula to someone saying that “since cancer patients die at much higher rate than people who have warts, the solution to narrowing that gap is to take away funding for cancer treatment.”
“I suspect many politicians in Trenton are trying to obfuscate the complexities surrounding school funding in order to drive a political wedge between urban and suburban voters, rich and poor voters, even between regular public school and charter school parents,” said Ms. Spalla.
In her comments at last week’s event, Ms. Spalla said that Princeton “is not the uniformly wealthy community that many believe us to be. We count among our students significant percentages of children who qualify for free or reduced lunch and English-language learners.” She said that underfunding in recent years and, in particular, this year’s budget formula pose a serious threat to the progress of eliminating the achievement gap among students. And, she added, “it is quite simply impossible for any school district to maintain achievement levels, much less raise them, while being starved of the funds necessary to do so.”
Ms. Sass-Rubin encouraged residents to call their legislators to let them know that these numbers, which are going to “devastate districts,” are unacceptable.
The 15 districts represented at last week’s event came from all over the state, and included urban, suburban, “some wealthier, some poor,” reported Ms. Sass-Rubin. “All of them are hurting.”
“We are all in this together, and it’s crucial for people to realize that,” added Ms. Spalla.
Save Our Schools is a nonpartisan, grassroots organization of parents and other “concerned residents” who believe that “all New Jersey children should have access to a high quality public education.”