Sen. Vin Gopal (D-Monmouth) is drafting legislation that could require certain schools merge with neighbors to save costs and drive down property taxes. (Hal Brown for New Jersey Monitor)
A top Senate Democrat is preparing legislation that could force some of New Jersey’s more than 600 school districts to merge or share services in an effort to control ever-rising school costs and the property taxes that pay for them.
School consolidation can save districts money by reducing administrative costs as well as those for professional services, like those offered by attorneys and engineers. But Sen. Vin Gopal (D-Monmouth), the chamber’s education chairman, said state efforts to incentivize mergers had seen little uptake, including in districts with tumbling enrollment and static costs.
“We’re going to look toward seeing what we can do to mandate regionalization and shared services to see if we can keep the great quality of education that New Jersey has but, at the same time, lower costs for taxpayers and save money,” he told the New Jersey Monitor. “We can’t operate 600 individual school districts anymore.”
School regionalization has long been a goal for state lawmakers looking to rein in property taxes, but relatively few districts have moved to merge with their neighbors, and school funding remains a top cost driver at both the local and state levels.
During the 2022 tax year, $17 billion of the more than $32.2 billion towns and counties collected in property taxes went to schools, according to statistics maintained by the Department of Community Affairs.
New Jersey’s current $56.7 billion budget provided for roughly $11.7 billion in school aid, the single largest pool of expenses on the state’s ledger for the 2025 fiscal year.
The specifics of Gopal’s plan remain unclear. The senator said it could include regionalization ballot initiatives showing property tax savings such mergers could secure or mandates to share services across districts rather than force them to consolidate, but mandated regionalization was also an option.
“We need to put everything on the table,” Gopal said. “We need to say how do we continue and expand on New Jersey’s quality of education, support our teachers and professionals, but also figure out how we can share some of these services so we’re cutting out some of the professional expenses.”
The proposal is all but guaranteed to face opposition, especially from wealthy districts with less well-funded neighbors, and could be stalled by resistance within the state government.
Gov. Phil Murphy, who has generally favored school mergers in the past, said he was “not wild about compulsory” consolidation and cautioned home rule — a constitutional framework that gives local governments broad authority over the administration of municipal services, including schools — could limit such efforts.
“I want to incent districts as opposed to jam districts,” he said during a press gaggle following an unrelated event Friday, adding, “If there’s an opportunity to stay excellent, keep the pride high, give the kids the best education in America — which is what we do now — and figure out a way to do it more efficiently, I’m open to that.”
Recent pushes toward school consolidation have been voluntary, and the state in 2022 enacted a law that extended grants for districts to study the feasibility of regionalization efforts. Few districts, most of them small, have moved to explore such mergers so far.
Lawmakers would work to ensure districts are involved in regionalization decisions, Gopal said.
“It’s going to be with a lot of input from the local level. We’re not trying to put anything over. We’re going to engage,” he said.
Gopal said he hoped to have a consolidation bill drafted by October or November, meaning it would come after separate legislation reworking New Jersey’s school funding formula that is expected to be introduced in mid-September.
The school funding bill could include incentives for regionalization and shared services agreements, he said, but the proposals are moving separately for now.
Some New Jersey districts have lost state school aid under a 2018 law that phased out aid meant to keep districts whole after the state enacted the current funding formula in 2008, and some districts have continued to lose aid amid falling enrollment.
School regionalization could help stabilize budgets in such districts, but consolidation has been an option for years and rarely utilized over that time.
“This is the start of a conversation that I think desperately needs to happen in New Jersey,” Gopal said. “Everybody loves the idea of consolidation. They just don’t want it in their back yard. It’s like everybody hates Congress, but they always vote for their congressperson.”
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