Too Many School Districts in New Jersey
By Gordon Bishop (01/08/07)
You do the math: There are 566 municipalities and mayors in New Jersey. There are 611 school districts.
Why the overlapping overloads of costly school districts that have put the Garden State in first place as having the highest property taxes in America?
Because of hypocritical, educational politics. Too many school districts. Too many superintendents and assistant superintendents and Boards of Education costing property taxpayers tens of millions of dollars a year of unnecessary expenditures.
New Jersey also claims the bragging rights for having the costliest per public school pupil at $8,500 for nine months of schooling.
Never forget, taxpayers: IT’S YOUR MONEY!
How did this ghastly runaway train of expensive public education come about?
It goes back to October 4, 1957 when the communist Soviet Union, in a race-to-outer-space, launched the first man-made orbiting satellite named “Sputnik.”
America, the world’s greatest post-World War II “superpower,” was embarrassed by this astronomical feat. America and its supreme technological advances in the 1950s – what with the Atom Bomb and thousands of nuclear missiles in the U.S. and scattered around the globe on U.S. military bases – was thought to be years ahead of the sluggish “Evil Empire.”
Thus began the creation of regional high schools in the United States. Each regional high school became a “school district.” The agenda was to beat the Soviet Union by emphasizing math and science in the regional high schools.
When President John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960, he raised the bar by declaring that the United States would have “a man on the moon” by the end of the decade. Kennedy’s inspirational vision was realized when Astronaut Neil Armstrong took the first human steps on the moon in 1969.
New Jersey taxpayers, of course, stepped up to the plate with plenty of money (in the billions of dollars), by raising property taxes to support 611 school districts.
New Jersey also holds the record as being the State with the “highest cost-of-living.”
Despite the billions of dollars pouring into the State Treasury every year, New Jersey no longer can balance its budget. Governor Jon Corzine’s first fiscal act was to increase the State’s budget from $29 billion last year to $31 billion this year.
Needless to say, more and more residents and businesses are leaving New Jersey in recent years to neighboring states with much lower property taxes, housing costs, educational costs and auto insurance coverage.
New Jersey, not Massachusetts, now has the distinction of being known as “TaxaJoisey,” the latest mocking jab at our colonial State.
Municipal school budgets today can range from 55 to 80 percent of our property taxes.
Where’s the “Tax Revolt” like the one our founding fathers declared in the 1776 American Revolution?
Rather than fight, taxpayers are heading south where government is much cheaper than New Jersey’s State, County and Municipal governments.
Unless New Jersey voters and taxpayers change our wasteful government ways, we will continue to pay more and work more to live in the once affordable and grand Garden State.
And it can begin with shrinking school districts and “sharing public services” among bordering towns, which Fair Haven, Little Silver and Rumson are beginning to do in Monmouth County.
Merging police, fire and infrastructure costs will be the best way to begin lowering property taxes.
Go for it, Jersey politicians, or get out of office!
Gordon Bishop
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