Credit: (NJ Spotlight News)New Jersey’s public schools were on the front burner Monday — and a hot one at that — as the Legislature started its deeper look into the details of Gov. Phil Murphy’s $48.9 billion budget for the next year.
The setting was the Assembly Budget Committee’s annual hearing with the education department and schools construction authority, the first of more than two dozen hearings on departmental budgets planned by both the Senate and Assembly budget committees over the coming months.
And while the Democratic-led committee has typically been deferential to the Murphy administration’s top education officials, this was no normal year, as education leaders got a bipartisan earful about the slow progress in addressing some long-standing — and some new — challenges facing the state’s schools.
School construction needs were only worsening, legislators said, worries were mounting about “learning loss” in schools and a mental health crisis at home, and inequities still persisted on state funding of schools.
The learning loss — or at least the perception of it — was a persistent line of questioning over the four-hour hearing. And nothing could have made the legislators’ impatience clearer than the closing words from the committee’s chair, directed at acting education Commissioner Angelica Allen-McMillan.
“This is not a ‘I-gotcha’ hearing, but we have got to do better,” said Assemblywoman Eliana Pintor Marin (D-Essex), chair of the Assembly’s budget committee. “The children don’t have time to wait. They really don’t have a couple of months to wait. The urgency is now.”
Urgent or not, here are a few takeaways from the hearing and questions still to be resolved.
School construction price tag, and counting
The head of the Schools Development Authority — the agency in charge of billions of dollars in construction projects over the last decade — came before the committee with a familiar refrain: New Jersey’s school buildings need help, lots of help.
After years of tumult and scandal, the SDA’s CEO, Manuel Da Silva, outlined the agency’s progress in the last year, including its recent approval of three new projects in Bridgeton, Elizabeth and Garfield. And he won plaudits for the greater transparency and accountability in an agency scarred by alleged patronage and waste.
But he didn’t hide that the price tag was only growing, saying the state would likely need at least $6 billion more in additional funds for just the needy districts falling under the landmark Abbott vs. Burke school equity decisions.
For now, Murphy has proposed an additional $150 million, a far cry from just the $1.6 billion to provide another 17,000 needed seats, he said. Add on the estimated $5 billion to replace or renovate at least 50 buildings so old as to be obsolete.
This is not a new issue, so much so that advocates have sent the case back to the state Supreme Court to decide. But this time, Da Silva twice offered an olive branch to the Legislature to work out a solution.
“We need to come up with a plan,” he said, “and the governor is willing to sit down with the Legislature.”
Learning loss: Who’s to blame?
Legislators from both sides of the aisle came primed to express their worries about the pandemic’s impact on students over the last two years. Depending on the perspective, they were looking for someone to blame, and the state Department for Education was a ready target.
Much of the charge came from Republicans on the panel, especially Assemblywoman Nancy Munoz (R-Morris).
She kept pressing Allen-McMillan to lay out the state’s strategy for addressing the disruptions in both the instruction and mental health of students. She cited one state test last fall that saw just one in 10 Trenton students reaching the state’s proficiency targets.
“Is there a long-term plan?” Munoz repeatedly asked. “Why are we not addressing this more clearly? In some cases, we have students who are two years behind.”
Allen-McMillan said that the administration’s priority is to bring back some normalcy for students and districts, not minimizing the instructional challenges but focusing on the mental health issues.
“This is not about remediation but acceleration,” the commissioner said at one point. “The learning loss on paper may look abysmal, but we see this as an opportunity to advance learning.”
That didn’t much appease Munoz and other legislators, who questioned why the state hasn’t set aside more money for specific programs. School districts have received more than $4 billion in federal funds to build their own strategies, but lawmakers pressed the administration to better guide those efforts.
“Do we need summer school? Longer school days?” Munoz said. “I see a lot of words, but not where any of it is in the budget.”
Added Pintor Marin, citing tens of millions in federal funds not yet spent: “I don’t know who to criticize. Is it the districts? Is it the department? All I know is we have children who can’t wait anymore.”
What wasn’t much discussed
Even for a four-hour hearing, there were a few hot topics that didn’t come up as much as one might expect.
One was the state’s ever-controversial school funding formula, the mechanism driving more than $9 billion in state aid to districts. In that annual allotment, about two-thirds of districts are continuing to see increases to match the formula, while nearly 200 districts are seeing cuts.
The lawmakers with school districts facing cuts raised their perennial complaints, but there appeared little appetite for making wholesale changes — at least with the Democratic leadership of the committee.
The recent scrums in New Jersey over curriculum and learning standards — most notably those around LGBTQ subjects and history — also didn’t surface as expected. Mask and vaccine policies were barely mentioned, if at all.
One assemblyman asked the commissioner if the state was mandating too much in “nonacademic” subjects. “Should we be dictating curriculum to the degree that we are?” said Assemblyman Brian Rumpf (R-Ocean).
Allen-McMillan gave a broad answer about standards only being guideposts and not actual curriculum, which is set by local districts. The topic went no further.
