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If they pay the same amount of money I would agree, but they don't.

All the broke school boards should consolidate into a countywide system. There are more school boards than localities and that's ridiculous.

It's unclear at this point how redistribution would affect Jersey City.

Jersey City gets WAY ($130 million) more aid than SFRA recommends, but even though it spends $17,500 per student, Jersey City is also technically under Adequacy.

The reason JC is under Adequacy are that its taxes are only $114 million, or $3600 per student. Even though JC gets $13,600 per student from the state, and its demographics put its Adequacy budget at about $20k per student and the local tax levy+state aid don't combine to equal the recommended budget.

Since Jersey City's LFS for 2016-17 is $315 million, Jersey City should lose state aid to help desperately needy districts, but the legislature may not allow any aid loss despite the huge gap between Jersey City's school taxes and its capacity to pay taxes because Jersey City's budget is lower than what SFRA says it should be based on its demographics.

I want to emphasize that the _percentage_ itself of students who are FRL eligible itself is not relevant to what aid the district should get. What is relevant is the raw number of students who are FRL eligible and then the tax base.

Some districts have more kids than others and Jersey City has proportionally few. Although JC is NJ's second largest city with 120,000 more people than Paterson, JC has only 6,000 more kids than Paterson and actually about 1,000 fewer FRL-eligible kids.

Likewise, Hoboken's 49% FRL eligibility is financially irrelevant since Hoboken has only 2600 public+charter school kids out of a population of 52,000.

By contrast, suburbs with about 40,000-50,000 people, like West Orange, South Orange-Maplewood, and Montclair, have 6,000-7,000 students.

Although WO, SOMA, and Montclair have much lower FRL-eligibility percentages than Hoboken, they all have more FRL-eligible kids in absolute terms.

Also, it's the tax base that's relevant too. If a district's Local Fair Share (i.e., tax base) is greater than its Adequacy Budget it does not get Equalization Aid. It doesn't matter what the demographics are.

If the tax base is good, aid will be minimal. Hence Atlantic City never being an Abbott and until this year getting only $18 million in state aid despite exceptional high poverty.

Jersey City gets an increase next year.

http://www.nj.com/education/2016/02/s ... html#incart_article_small

There is another link in the story, we are going down $20 million.