The township school board unanimously approved a resolution at its March 10 meeting asking the state legislature to improve its school funding formula and address other financial issues.
The measure calls on the state to amend the formula by utilizing something other than property value to gauge community wealth and calculate special education funding. The latter should be based on the actual number of students and fully funded extraordinary aid, the board believes.
Board member Bridget Palmer thanked everyone on the panel for working together on a resolution aimed at various stakeholders.
“It’s important, we felt, as a board, that we tell our story in whatever way we can to the appropriate stakeholders,” Palmer explained. “So that led to legislative leadership, certainly Majority Leader (Louis) Greenwald, the governor, the new Department of Education commissioner. This is the vehicle by which we are doing that.”
Fellow board member Melissa Manzano acknowledged Palmer’s work on the resolution.
“I just want to thank Ms. Palmer for her attention to this in spearheading and also her pride and commitment to voicing those opinions, getting it out as quickly as possible,” Manzano said.
An issue highlighted by the resolution – and echoed by board members – is the fact that the district gets 81% of its funding from local property taxes, something more state funding would obviously help decrease. The idea was among issues Gov. Mikie Sherrill campaigned on, and she touched on the issue of affordability in her recent 2027 fiscal budget address.
Board member Miriam Stern also pointed to a 2022 presentation before the board that highlighted the fact that since 2010, the district has received less than 50% of promised state aid.
“That went on for 10 years,” Stern recounted. “We got under 50% … for 10 years. That is a major compounding impact.”
Another board member, Renee Cherfane, asked if there were issues talked about in committee meetings that didn’t make it into the final resolution. Palmer responded that the district didn’t want numbers to get in the way of the story (it) was trying to tell, even if they could have included another 10 statements.
“This is a narrative, it’s a story,” she noted. “Rather than, I’d say, bog it down with percentages, and a percentage may or may not mean the same things to different people. I think in my mind, it was enough to say that we’ve had year over year of these compounding tax increases …”
Board President Gina Winters recalled how she wrote proclamations when she worked in the legislature, so she knows how to draft resolutions like the one the board passed.
“This is really supposed to be just an argument and the language is very formal,” she pointed out. “The legislators are used to reading stuff like this. This is sort of the way they communicate. So Bridget and I really worked together on just that piece of it, making it sound the way that they will receive it best.
“They also do not read anything that’s longer than two pages,” she added of state legislators. “Ever. At all. And generally one page is better.”
Palmer said if the district is paying 81% of its budget through local taxes, the state isn’t keeping up.
“People think that we’re Cherry Hill, we’ve got all this money,” Palmer observed. “We don’t. We’re a community of working-class people. There might be some outliers, but each and every one of us struggles to pay for our own increases in the daily cost of living.
“And when taxes are the primary means by which we fund a very important and treasured educational system in this town … you cannot tell me, if we’re footing 81% of the bill, the state is keeping up its end of the bargain.”
