In Toms River, we get taxes imposed while our neighbors get loans, thereby saving their taxpayers. Why? That is something that warrants ‘deep concerns.’ In Toms River, we’re threatened that unless we pass a budget, we must shirk our most basic responsibilities and not open our doors, and thus ignore our most vulnerable students who need summer and ESL services. That also is of ‘deep concern.’
Make no mistake, the Toms River School Board and TRRS administration did not fail our district or demonstrate incompetence. The board met every deadline whereby they had to take action. They rejected a proposed tax increase because our BOE respects the code of ethics and respects their fiduciary duty to the taxpayer, something the NJDOE does not care about, at least not in certain districts or areas in the state.
The NJDOE’s ranting about the board and administration of Toms River Regional Schools is baseless and simply a smokescreen to hide their nefarious actions in imposing, over the last two years, a 22.2-percent tax increase on the residents of this community. The efficiencies our district has tirelessly achieved and maintained used to be to the benefit of our taxpayers. But the state has stolen our savings and distributed it to the rest of the state using a clandestine formula. That formula and this entire mess stems from State Bill S2, a false flag for the greatest wealth redistribution in the history of the state. What S2 did was take hundreds of millions of dollars from politically-unfavorable areas and funnelled it into urban and suburban districts in politically-favored areas. It is that simple.
Since the bill’s inception in 2017, we have been warning about its catastrophic effects, which have been fully realized and thensome. We’ve cut more than 250 staff positions, reduced supply budgets, sold our admin building and other property, and have used every legal and legislative channel possible to combat these cuts and fight for our students, all the while being the lowest-cost district in the state.
We have repeatedly demonstrated the state’s manipulation through S2 mathematically, clearly, and in ways that lay bare what is happening here. Meanwhile, more than five years after the initial filing of an OPRA to reveal the state aid formula calculations for local fair share (property and income wealth multipliers), the NJDOE is still stone-walling and will not provide. Note that this covers the distribution of the $9.2 billion in equalization aid, the largest single line, comprising more than 15-percent of the state's $58.8 billion budget.
At our June 30 special board meeting, we announced that rather than pass a budget that imposed more taxes on our residents, we were exploring filing for bankruptcy. This strategic move combined with its inherent defiance of the NJDOE’s wishes was an affront to them, and they responded by imposing the tax hike on our residents. If the state had to disallow our district from pursuing bankruptcy, it is fine with risking personal potential bankruptcies of our 100k-plus residents.
We are not fine with that, clearly, so now our funding fight shifts from being on behalf of our students to on behalf of our taxpayers. It’s safe to say, after seven long years of a clearly unjust and secret funding formula, we’re sensing a troubling pattern that indicates deeper and systemic concerns about the ability of the state to meet its most basic responsibilities.