Katie Brennan explains why Jersey City property taxes are soaring as the public schools struggle

Jersey City residents are getting a bad deal, and they’re right to be upset about it.

Property taxes have skyrocketed in recent years, yet our schools continue to struggle without enough resources. Homeowners, renters, and students are all asking the same question: Why are we paying more but getting less?

The answer lies in Trenton, where a 2018 change to the state’s school funding formula has quietly taken more than $270 million away from Jersey City’s public schools. And now, Governor Murphy’s latest budget proposes another $4 million in cuts.

While these decisions are made in committee rooms far from our community, the consequences are felt directly in our classrooms and our wallets.

Every time state aid is cut, local property taxes rise to fill the gap — not to add teachers or support staff but to simply maintain basic services.

How We Got Here: The Funding Formula Fails Jersey City

This funding crisis didn’t happen overnight. After state lawmakers passed S2 and altered the school funding formula in 2018, Jersey City has experienced the largest reduction in state aid of any district in the state. Why?

The new formula fails to account for the actual demographics and needs of our diverse city in two big ways.

First, the state now treats Jersey City as if everyone here is wealthy, when the reality on the ground tells a different story.

To determine how much school funding should come from local property taxes, the formula simply adds everyone’s incomes together, adds all property values together, plugs these numbers into an equation, and divides it by two.

This ignores vast disparities across the city and lets outliers skew the numbers, whether it’s the income of a Wall Street CEO or the value of a new high-rise on the waterfront.

Meanwhile, half of students qualify for free or reduced lunch, less than half meet English or math proficiency benchmarks, and the state’s own “municipal distress” index ranks Jersey City in the bottom 15 percent across various economic metrics.

Second, the state fails to recognize that the cost of educating students living in poverty is significantly higher than the formula acknowledges.

The formula uses a weighting system to provide more funding for students who qualify for reduced price lunches and English language learners, but research shows it’s not nearly enough.

Making matters worse, if a low-income student is also an English language learner, those weights almost completely cancel each other out, leaving districts like Jersey City with even less funding.

It’s Time to Fund Jersey City’s Schools

For more than six years, these funding cuts have continued while our representatives in Trenton have remained largely silent.

If we want to set our students up for success and keep Jersey City affordable, we cannot passively accept an unfair system that takes hundreds of millions of dollars from our schools.

And it’s not enough to simply reject the latest cuts. Jersey City needs leaders in Trenton who understand how school funding works so we can finally fix the formula and bring more funding to our district.

My Plan to Fix the School Funding Formula

The state legislature has the power to fix this broken system, and as a candidate for Assembly, I’m committed to addressing this crisis head-on with specific and actionable reforms that will bring fairness — and more funding — to Jersey City’s schools.

Most importantly, the formula needs to provide more funding for low-income students and English language learners.

This can be accomplished by doubling the poverty weight from 0.5 per pupil to at least 1.0; increasing the English language learner weight from 0.5 to 0.7; and allowing both weights to fully count for students that qualify for both.

These changes would bring in millions more dollars for the district, lessening the burden on property taxpayers and setting more students up for success.

Next, the state should reassess how income and property values are used to determine each district’s “local fair share,” making sure that diverse urban areas like Jersey City are treated fairly.

This calculation should also be transparent and use 5-year averages to prevent large, unpredictable swings from year-to-year.

Finally, the state Department of Education should review and update the formula every three years to ensure it’s working as intended, that the weights for students are sufficient, and that the tax code is fair for everyone instead of arbitrarily picking winners and losers.

The future of Jersey City depends on public education that is both high quality and affordable. Fortunately, we can make this a reality, but it requires fighting for Jersey City’s fair share in Trenton. Our students, our teachers, and our taxpayers deserve nothing less.

Read the Op-Ed on Hudson County View