Falling Test Scores, Rising Absenteeism: Suit Details Aid Cuts Toll On Toms River Schools
TOMS RIVER, NJ — The Toms River Regional School District has filed its lawsuit against the New Jersey Department of Education over funding cuts that the district says has stripped it of its ability to provide a thorough and efficient education.
The lawsuit, filed Monday in Superior Court in Ocean County, alleges the funding reductions under S2 have skewed the implementation of the School Funding Reform Act of 2008, leaving the Toms River Regional district operating "significantly below" the amount of money the state says should be spent to provide students with "the essential resources needed for a T&E education."
It also breaks down in detail the extent of the negative impacts the cuts have had on the district, from falling test scores and proficiency levels on state assessments to rising absenteeism and behavioral issues.
Among those details:
"The lack of funding has impacted the District's ability to provide core resources and textbooks for each grade level and content area, as well as intervention services to students to provide a multi-tiered system of support to students at risk of not meeting academic achievement and growth targets," the lawsuit says.
Significant behavioral and absenteeism increases:
The filing of the lawsuit comes nearly three months after it was announced by Superintendent Michael Citta and William Burns, the district's attorney, during a special meeting of the school board on July 3. Read more: 'Legislative Child Abuse And Neglect': Toms River Regional To Sue NJ Over State Aid Cuts
At that meeting, the Toms River Regional Board of Education unanimously rejected the $291 million proposed budget. That tentative budget, with a 9.9 percent increase in the district's property tax levy, later was approved by the Ocean County executive superintendent of schools.
Citta and Burns also announced the hiring of the Busch Law Group, a Metuchen firm that specializes in education litigation, to represent the district and three families of students in the district.
The district has been fighting the S2 cuts since 2017, when then-state Senate President Steve Sweeney and then-Gov. Chris Christie agreed to a last-minute deal that traded school funding cuts to some districts — which Sweeney wanted — for the gasoline tax increase Christie sought.
The goal, Sweeney said at the time, was to cut so-called "adjustment aid" that Toms River and dozens of other districts had received when the School Funding Reform Act of 2008 was finally implemented in 2011. The adjustment aid was supposed to give districts that were deemed "overaided" time to adjust to new funding levels.
The legislation now referred to as S2 became law in 2018, and in the years since it became law, the Toms River Regional School District has seen a cumulative reduction in aid of $193 million and has cut more than 350 positions. But the cuts have continued well past the time where the district's adjustment aid was gone, as the discussion shifted from "adjustment aid" to "local fair share."
Toms River Regional's adjustment aid reduction, according to figures released in 2017 by the state Office of Legislative Services , was $18,572,932. Calculated over seven years, that cumulative reduction in aid would have been about $130 million. Read more: School Aid Fight: Toms River To Lose $18M Under Sweeney Plan
District officials had been pleading with state officials to revisit the aid the district is receiving for 2024-25, citing a $12.4 million revenue gap that existed after all other measures — including a 9.9 percent increase in the district's property tax levy — were accounted for.
Under the budget rejected by the Toms River Regional school board, the district is supposed to sell off various properties, including the administrative offices at 1144 Hooper Ave., the district's maintenance yard at 123 Walnut St., and the district's transportation facility on Route 37— where its school buses are stored at night and where its mechanics work — along with pieces of land next to Joseph A. Citta Elementary, next to Toms River High School East, and next to East Dover Elementary.
Those asset sales, however, are one-time revenue injections and the district would start the next budget cycle with a deficit — which is part of why the district is suing the state now. Though S2 was supposed to end with the 2024-25 budget year, state legislators have made no efforts to make adjustments.
The lawsuit notes that the School Funding Reform Act "specifically determines the level of resources and funding required for each district to optimize the likelihood that all children receive an education that prepares them for productive participation in the democracy and economy. This resource and funding level established by the SFRA is known as the Adequacy Budget – the critical core of the formula."
"As the SFRA is currently structured, the State has failed to implement a formula that provides Toms River the funding and resources at levels to sustain their educational program which is already far below Adequacy, let alone a formula that permits the District's Adequacy Gap to be reduced or eliminated in the future. Instead, the District's Adequacy Gap has grown — and will continue to grow in the future — levels constituting a profound constitutional deprivation, i.e. depriving students of resources essential for them to achieve the NJSLS (New Jersey State Learning Standards), the substantive definition of a T&E education," the lawsuit said.
"Rather, the SFRA has been implemented by the State in ways that result in structural defects that impede Toms River from even remotely approaching Adequacy. These defects include, but are not limited to, using the formula's Local Fair Share ("LFS") to determine the State's share of funding the Adequacy Budget, creating a local levy gap — the difference between the actual statutorily permitted levy and the local share used to calculate state aid; by allowing State aid to support the Adequacy Budget to be reduced as the LFS has increased," the lawsuit said.
Toms River Regional's structural deficit "has increased by 108 percent in seven (7) years resulting in an increase in its Adequacy Gap by $28,877,837 from $26,639,472 in 2017-2018 to $55,517,309 for the current 2024-2025 school year," the lawsuit said.
The result has been the "impending educational failure of programs and services depriving its students of the resources required to provide the Constitutional Thorough and Efficient Education necessary to be productive citizens pursuant to the State's own statutory and regulatory standards under the SFRA and New Jersey Student Learning Standards."
