We Don’t Need This Many School Districts and Salaries

Updated: Oct. 04, 2023, 7:50 a.m.
Published: Oct. 04, 2023, 7:15 a.m.

Virginia has about the same population we do, but only 132 school districts. So why do we have so many in New Jersey? 

- By Star-Ledger Editorial Board

It’s kind of stunning that we have more than 600 school districts in New Jersey – that’s more than the total number of municipalities, and certainly more than we need for kids.

Granted, California has even more than we do – over 1,000 districts – but we’re a contender after that. A bunch of other states, like Connecticut, have about 200 districts. Virginia has about the same population we do, but only 132 school districts. So why do we have so many in New Jersey?

Some are tiny, operating a single school that only goes up to 5th or 8th grade, yet still have their own central office staff, which drives up costs and just seems absurd on its face. If given the opportunity, we should merge as many of them as we can.

Not only is the bureaucracy cumbersome, but if we didn’t have so many districts, we wouldn’t have as ferocious a fight over whether a business or office park locates on one side of the border or the other. That fragmented system and fierce competition for tax ratables prevents us from building new housing and desegregating our schools, says Tim Evans, the director of research at NJ Future.

And merging school districts is more economical over the long-term, because you don’t need to negotiate separate teacher contracts or hire separate district attorneys. By including students from multiple schools, you can also offer better programming for kids, like Mandarin classes or universal pre-k.

No, this isn’t going to create major tax savings, if you retain roughly the same number of teachers at the same benefit levels; after all, about 70 percent of a typical school budget is salaries and benefits. But we’ll still take it over the alternative.

The savings can also vary: Salem County – where more than a dozen districts serve about 10,500 schoolchildren— could see an annual tax savings of about $6.8 million by consolidating into one regional district, a Kean University study calculates. A much smaller merger, like one just approved last month by voters in Atlantic Highlands and Highlands – which will combine their two elementary school districts and their shared 7-12 district, which only serve about 735 students in total – could save roughly $320,000 a year in taxes.

It’s the first successful merger in nearly a decade and the first under a new law that former Sen. Steve Sweeney got passed in January 2022, right before he left office, which offers financial incentives for some smaller school districts to consolidate.

Before they merged, these three districts were already sharing many services. But among other excesses, they still had three different school attorneys and auditors, separate contracts for services like speech therapy and three school physicians to coordinate with during the height of the pandemic. “You just realize the redundancy of some of this,” their shared superintendent, Tara Beams, told us. “You also realize it’s really difficult to expand programs because you’re still working within the small district.”

Now they can offer expanded services for special education and gifted students, she says. And while one of the two elementary districts previously qualified for universal pre-K and the other didn’t, now that they’re joining up, both can offer it. So it’s a good case for the benefits of regionalization.

Of course, it takes a lot of time and effort to do this; these three districts have been working towards a merger for decades, Beams said. They finally committed to pushing it forward after Kean University did its study in the Spring. Sweeney’s latest venture, the Rowan School Regionalization Institute, is staffed with academics and former school officials who will also support districts through this process, says Mark Magyar, the director of the Steve Sweeney Center for Public Policy at Rowan University.

“It’s not a panacea in terms of property taxes,” he acknowledges, but it’s about improving how we deliver education. And when you do find savings – whether through having one payroll, HR system or technology vendor, consolidating bus transportation or staggering classes – you can pump it right back into the school system.

The easiest path to a merger is when districts already share a high school, he notes; the various towns all root for that same high school football team and trust their kids to go there. For districts moving steadily in this direction, and establishing shared services, the rationale for merging extends well beyond any tax savings: It’s just the next logical step.