Education Team action priorities for 2022:​

Our priorities, as always, were informed by listening. We launched a listening campaign in Fall 2021 and engaged in action in March on all of our priorities. In October of 2022, we held an action on our water advocacy; for more information on that see the page on our water advocacy.

 

We want excellent public schools for all students, and cannot afford to go backward.

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At our public action on March 7, 2022, we asked public officials to prioritize our city’s children in this year’s school budget and sustainably into the future. The students of our district have grown up with years of chronic underfunding followed by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

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Our organizing work always begins with listening. We have listened to thousands of parents and caregivers throughout the district since 2018, and one resounding theme is that we need sufficient, qualified, full-time staff to ensure smaller class sizes, more and better mental health and wraparound support, and better morning and aftercare services. 

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As we have long advocated, our city’s children deserve a fulsome investment from our community in the form of:

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• Fully staffed classrooms that support smaller class sizes

• Sufficient wraparound support in the form of CITs, mental health staff, and more in every school, 

• Critical capital repairs in all schools including working water fountains with drinkable water by the end of 2022 

• A transparent reporting of the needs in each school and how those needs are being met so that public stakeholders - namely parents, caregivers, staff, and taxpayers - can understand the investments. 

These investments are not possible absent a fully funded budget with sustainable funding year on year. 

 

We realize that there are three distinct areas of funding available to the district this year:

 

1. $96 million of federal COVID-19 pandemic aid which will expire within the next two years. We believe these monies should be used to fund capital expenses like building repairs, technology investment, learning loss interventions, and other one-time costs.

2. State aid, which is reduced by $68 million for the 2022-23 school year 

3. The local school levy, which must be the primary source of funding the schools now and each year into the future. 

 

Our children need their schools to be places where they can learn, grow, and flourish. This requires that the schools be fully funded. The graduating class of 2021 in Jersey City never experienced full funding in the entire time that they were in school. Over the last two years due to our advocacy work, the district has turned this around; we cannot go back. Our children deserve nothing less.

 

It is time for Jersey City Public Schools to provide the excellent education that our children deserve.

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What is full funding & why have we been fighting for it?

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The state of New Jersey adopted a formula in 2008 to determine how much each school district needs to provide a thorough and efficient education to the children enrolled in the district. The formula is considered by experts on school finance to be a very good estimate of what our children need.

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Full funding ensures our district will have the teachers, teacher's aides, counselors, nurses, academic coaches, janitors, and administrators that the district needs. It pays for programs -- summer school, after school, 

enrichment, and more. It often pays for the upkeep of buildings, regular maintenance, cleanliness, and more.

 

From 2008 to 2018 the gap between what the state of New Jersey says our kids need and what they actually receive grew steadily. It took our advocacy to start to turn this around. Read the Education Law Center's report about funding in Jersey City. 

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Jersey City's deserve a world class education every year. But -- in the midst (and aftermath) of a global pandemic -- our district will need the resources to take action to address the inequities in the system. A fully funded budget is an important, first step. 

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Because of our work in recent years, the 2021-22 school year will be the first time in more than a decade that the Jersey City Public Schools have a fully-funded budget (as defined by the state). We will have work to do to ensure it stays that way. But we must also make sure resources are actually used well and allocated to address long-standing needs.