Assembly lawmakers approved a bill Monday intended to help school districts that have seen by extending one-time grants and allowing them to hike local taxes above the state-mandated 2% cap without getting voter approval.

, approved in a 51-20 vote almost entirely along party lines, would allow districts that have seen cuts since the 2020-21 school year to raise their levies by up to 9.9%, with hikes capped to the amount of state aid the district has lost over that period.

“We’re here today to present a solution for this year. That’s why we’re here under a short time frame. That’s why it’s happening quickly — because school boards must act,” said Assemblyman Roy Freiman (D-Somerset), the bill’s prime sponsor.

The bill’s proponents have cast it as a sorely needed Band-Aid to address steep swings in state aid that roughly a third of New Jersey’s school districts have seen annually since 2018. That’s when lawmakers approved a bill, called S2, meant to shift aid from historically overfunded districts to historically underfunded ones.

Though they were controversial from the outset, the aid adjustments have drawn consternation from lawmakers and school officials after rising home valuations and inflationary pressures led to state aid reductions that were far steeper than anticipated.

In the coming school year, 140 districts face nearly $106 million in combined cuts, with the reductions ranging from $989 in West Wildwood to $10.4 million in Long Branch.

Republicans largely opposed the bill, favoring a competing measure sponsored by Assemblyman Brian Rumpf (R-Ocean) that would cap school aid cuts to 1%. GOP legislators said lawmakers should instead look to make permanent changes to the school funding formula signed into law in 2008.

“School board members in the 24th Legislative District are not asking for a mechanism to dramatically increase property taxes above that which they are currently allowed. What they’re asking for is fair school funding from the state of New Jersey,” said Assemblyman Mike Inganamort (R-Morris).

Six Republicans — Assemblymen Michael Torrissi, Erik Simonsen, Antwan McClellan, Alex Sauickie, Robert Clifton, and Rumpf — voted in favor of the bill that passed Monday. Democratic Assemblymen Dan Hutchison and Cody Miller voted no.

Separate provisions of the bill would create a $71.4 million grant program meant to defray two-thirds of cuts proposed for the coming school year in affected districts.

Districts could receive the grants if they face a state aid reduction for the 2024-2025 school year. Schools receiving such grants are barred from cutting staff past what is needed to account for changes in enrollment.

Assemblywoman Rosy Bagolie (D-Essex), who is East Newark’s superintendent, said school budget timelines made Republican urgings against the bill untenable, noting officials have just weeks to finalize budgets amid still-shifting aid figures.

“Either it’s Christmas, and we get our funding, or Krampus comes and takes the floor from under us. We cannot mitigate as superintendents — within the timeline that we have to present budgets, to rehire teachers by May 15th — to do what you’re asking us to do,” she said.

Lawmakers are exploring changes to the state’s funding formula that would bring some uncovered expenses, like certain transportation costs, under its auspices, as the state approaches the final school aid increase called for by S2.

Some Republicans urged their Democratic counterparts to speed up that process.

“It’s not like a phenomenon of the weather, that you just watch it come down and it affects our school districts in some strange way,” said Assemblyman Jay Webber (R-Morris). “You’re the majority party. If you don’t like the school funding formula, change it. If you think it has all these awful effects, let’s do a new one.”

Acting Education Commissioner Kevin Dehmer last week told Assembly lawmakers the department expects outsized changes to state aid to , though some shifts will still be caused by other factors, like changes to enrollment.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle on Monday signaled skepticism over the supposed end of steep aid swings.

“We still are going to have to come together to address the bigger issue, which is what’s going to happen in out years,” Freiman said. “We still are faced with the scenario of next year: What do they do?”

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Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles will require roughly two dozen schools to cut 12 percent of their budgets next year, initiating a painful but expected process meant to bring campus-level spending in line with declining enrollments.

The cuts will target schools not participating in Miles’ “New Education System” next year, whose budgets are managed by campus principals. HISD manages the budgets of schools in the NES program and funds them at a significantly higher level than other schools.

On Tuesday, HISD provided half of the district’s principals with preliminary information about their campus budgets for next year and plans to provide information to the other half Wednesday. Most of HISD’s roughly 140 non-NES principals will have to make cuts in their spending, capped at a 12 percent reduction, due to decreases in the number of students attending their schools.

Roughly 25 schools will have to slash the maximum 12 percent, while about 35 schools will see increases to their budgets, Miles estimated in a Monday interview with the Houston Landing. That leaves dozens more schools to reduce spending between 1 and 12 percent. HISD declined to say which schools will be subject to the steepest cuts.

The tough financial pill stems from a decision by Miles to end HISD’s pandemic-era policy to insulate schools from budget cuts, even when their enrollment and attendance decline. With pandemic relief money set to soon run out and with HISD expected to run a this year, Miles said it is time to bring spending in line with student counts.

“People have known this is coming,” Miles said. “If they’ve lost 100 kids, they are going to have to cut some staff. At some point, we do have to stop paying for kids who actually aren’t there.”

In recent years, HISD has lost about 32,000 students, . Since the policy of not reducing schools’ budgets based on attendance went into effect, more than 150 schools have lost 12 percent or more of their student enrollments, including more than 60 non-NES schools.

In total, the cuts will save about $15 million across the district, Miles said. The savings represent a of Miles has said he plans to make next year. However, they represent the first time Miles has outlined plans likely to result in widespread staffing reductions at the campus level.

Due to a in 2024-25 and a dramatic increase in the number of overhauled schools paying teachers salaries $10,000 to $20,000 above their typical rates, HISD plans to spend an additional $114 million on staff next year, including $74 million at NES schools, according to Chief of Human Resources Jessica Neyman. Miles has said he plans to present a draft budget proposal for next year’s spending to HISD’s board of managers in May.

Schools undergoing Miles’ transformation, which typically have a quarter to a third more employees than other HISD schools, also will be subject to limited staffing cuts if they have lost students, Miles said. He estimated  NES schools could lose one to two non-teaching roles.

Former Love Elementary Principal Sean Tellez, who resigned in early March, said he thinks the cuts fall unfairly on schools not participating in Miles’ overhaul program. The end of the policy insulating campuses from attendance-related budget cuts did not surprise him, because former HISD Superintendent Millard House’s administration had warned it was coming. However, he thought the whole district would be subject to the painful spending decisions, rather than just the half not participating in Miles’ NES program.

As a principal, Tellez had to make budget cuts, including last year reducing the work hours of the Love Elementary nurse and librarian, eliminating a technology role and cutting a front office worker. If he were forced to eliminate 12 percent of his spending, he would have to cut at least one teacher and it would be “virtually impossible” to keep students from feeling the losses, he said.

“The overwhelming vibe, or feeling, amongst the non-NES principals has been, because we’re not NES, we’re going to have to bear the burden of this increased budget for NES schools and we’re going to be on our own,” Tellez said.

Researcher Chad Aldeman, who previously served as policy director at Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab and now runs the organization , studies school enrollment and staffing trends nationwide. Across the country, most school districts have seen increasing numbers of staff-per-student ratios since the pandemic, mostly due to student headcounts falling faster than staffing levels, he said, creating looming budgetary difficulties.

However, while making cuts to balance staffing levels may be necessary in many instances, it rarely is straightforward, Aldeman explained.

“Let’s say you lose 20 students across an elementary, they’re not going to be all in one grade. … So, you might lose two students or two-and-a-half students from every grade, and you can’t just reduce your staff by one fourth-grade teacher,” Aldeman said. “None of these things are fun. They’re not good for kids.”

Miles said he empathizes with principals now facing dreaded decisions, but said he had no other choice. HISD is easing the process for principals by covering certain expenses, such as approved curricular materials, he said.

“I’ve been a principal, I’ve been a charter school principal, and I know what it is to have to do a budget and I know what a cut looks like, even a 10 percent cut,” Miles said. “​​If I can protect the classroom from any cut, that’s what we’re going to do. But we do have to live within our means now.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Those initiatives, created to help the high-poverty district’s students after schools closed during the pandemic, are among the highest-profile cuts out of $91 million proposed by new district CEO Warren Morgan.

Other proposals to cover the loss of an additional $12,000 per student in COVID aid also include ending a decade-long experiment of year-round classes in some schools.

“We got almost $500 million in COVID relief dollars from the federal government that allowed us to do really extraordinary things during an extraordinary period of time,” Morgan said as he announced his plan. “Those dollars go away, creating a little bit of this cliff.. in the financial situation that we’re in.”

A placed Cleveland with the third-highest per-student grants of big cities in the country, after Detroit and Philadelphia.

The exact details of cuts will be set over the next few months. More cuts are expected for the 2025-26 school year.

But the broad plan for cuts outlined by Morgan and which the school board will vote on Tuesday is Cleveland’s first public attempt to sort out which pandemic programs are worth keeping and what older efforts must be cut as a tradeoff.

Cleveland is not alone in having to make cuts as the $190 billion infusion the federal government gave schools through relief grants known as CARES, ESSER and ARPA run out. 

But both the financial boost from pandemic aid, and now the crash, is far more dramatic for high-poverty districts like Cleveland, which has the highest child poverty rate in the country among big cities.

Because the aid formula sent more money to high-poverty districts than affluent ones, the pandemic grants gave the neediest students more help with tutoring, laptops, better ventilation, mental health and other programs to catch up from lost school time. 

The Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University reported in the fall that .The , though enrollment swings the last few years make exact numbers impossible.

“For many of those districts, it made up an outsized percentage of their usual budget, which we think from an equity perspective, was a great thing because it allows those districts to make investments that they have long needed,” said Qubilah Huddleston, who works on school funding issues for the Education Trust. “That said, they are also now faced with making some of the toughest budget decisions that they probably had to make in a while.”

Huddleston also cautioned that other factors, including state aid changing as enrollment fell across the country, are adding to districts’ budget troubles.

”Districts are dealing with a lot more than just the ESSER loss,” she said. “It’s certainly the factor that’s contributing the most, but they have also experienced enrollment declines that they did not expect. They have also inflation, right, things costing more, whether it’s energy, whether it’s labor… happening all at the same time that this loss of ESSER dollars is happening.”

Cleveland has its own local issues affecting how the cuts play out. The district has a new CEO, allowing him to pick his own priorities without being accountable for past promises. The district expected budget deficits in the next few years regardless of COVID and COVID aid, so typical financial needs are hard to separate from those caused by the loss of federal money. 

And the district is negotiating a new contract with the Cleveland Teachers Union, which will add costs, so Cleveland officials have incentive to highlight a lack of money while teachers have incentive to focus on what is still available.

Cleveland Teachers Union President Shari Obrenski said the long-expected cuts are not a crisis and noted that all the federal money may have bought the district an extra year before needing to ask voters for a tax increase.

“This is what I find frustrating about the narrative that’s coming from the district right now,” Obrenski said. “We were able to use our ESSER dollars to make our general fund dollars last longer, which I think was actually a very good idea.”

Some of Cleveland’s proposed cuts hit programs that started using federal aid, while others cut efforts championed by former CEO Eric Gordon that Morgan is re-evaluating.

Morgan has proposed cutting $6.4 million budgeted for providing every student a laptop and providing many with portable wifi hotspots when they do not have internet access at home. So-called “one-to-one” computer programs are increasingly common in suburban districts and was a goal of Gordon for years before the pandemic forced the district to buy devices for remote classes in the 2020-21 school year.

It was a huge step for Cleveland, ranked as the worst-connected city in America by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance.

The district also made continuing this program a key promise of its fall 2020 campaign for a tax increase for the schools.

But Morgan said not all students are receiving laptops and teachers are often not sending them home with students.

The district would not immediately answer questions from ���˶��� about how many laptops or hotspots are included in that estimate or how much progress has been made in attempts to provide affordable internet access in disconnected neighborhoods.

Cleveland’s summer learning program, which took traditional remedial programs and turned them into a mix of classes and fun activities as a way to re-engage students, is also being trimmed. Morgan estimated he can save $30 million over the next two years by cutting the program from 4,225 students last year to 3,500 this year with more class time in shorter days.

Morgan also proposed cutting $34.1 million over two years budgeted for afterschool programs run by outside groups like the Boys and Girls Club or America SCORES, a national program that mixes soccer with poetry. Traditional school athletic teams and clubs are not affected.

A coalition of providers, Clevelanders for Afterschool, has formed in opposition, saying cutting 93 programs from 17 providers will hurt students. David Smith, who runs some programs and is organizing the push to keep them, said they help students emotionally and academically, along with helping reduce crime in the city.

“It’s not a good idea to push these kids out in the streets after school and close the building behind them,” Smith said.

Morgan said he hopes these programs can find other funding or that city recreation centers can fill the gap.

Morgan also proposed saving close to $14 million by cutting extra school days from schools that have classes year-round or extra days in the school year. Gordon started several specialized high schools that focused on topics like STEM, medicine, or aerospace and maritime careers that run through the summer to keep learning momentum with students and avoid summer learning loss.

Those eight schools have 20 additional school days, while another 13 have 10 extra days added to their school years.

Morgan said the academic results of these schools are mixed, even though they receive more money than other schools to pay teachers for extra days.

“Right now, that sets up some inequities,” Morgan said. “We have schools that are receiving disproportionately more resources, more time and school days. Staff are receiving more resources. We do want to really make sure that we are equitable.”

Public school administrators were well aware that the last month would likely mean getting no new money for teacher raises and inflation adjustments this year. Gov. had long threatened to veto any education funding bill without a voucher component.

But they were surprised and disappointed that proposals that would have provided them with additional funds for school safety — a stated priority for many lawmakers in the aftermath of the Uvalde school shooting — also fell apart.

The fourth special legislative session this year ended without a vote on separate House and Senate bills that would have boosted school safety funding — both of which came after they didn’t have enough money to fulfill new safety requirements passed earlier this year.

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Now, with many districts already operating in deficit budgets, superintendents across the state say they will be forced to make significant budget cuts to meet the new safety mandates.

“Whether we’re rural, large, small, urban, suburban, when we superintendents get together and chat… all of us are like, ‘Where are we going to get the dollars? What are you cutting?’” Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde said. She added that her district might have to nix extracurriculars, field trips and transportation for students in magnet schools — along with laying off teachers and increasing student class sizes.

— which the Texas Legislature in response to the — requires districts to post an armed security guard at every school and provide mental health training to certain employees. To fund these measures, the law gave school districts $15,000 per campus and $10 per student, along with allotting $1.1 billion to the Texas Education Agency to administer grants that schools can apply for. In 2022, lawmakers also approved to help school districts pay for safety upgrades.

Last month, the House that would have boosted that funding by $1.3 billion. The Senate , which would have also increased the funding schools receive for safety upgrades and given the TEA $400 million more for its school safety grants. Both bills failed to advance for a vote in the opposite chamber.

Elizalde said Dallas ISD went into a $186 million deficit this year to keep up with costs, including the implementation of the new security measures ordered by HB 3. The district has recently acquired a grant of more than $20 million from the TEA, she said, but the one-time grant won’t ensure Dallas public schools can keep up with security mandates in the long term.

With more than 220 campuses, the district needs approximately $3 million annually to post trained security guards at every school, Elizalde said. It’s not that school board members and leaders don’t want to meet these new expectations, she added — they just don’t have the funds to do so.

“That has become our biggest obstacle — how do you, time and time again, continue to make cuts to make sure that we have the safest schools possible?” Elizalde said.

Issues hiring security personnel

Elizalde said Dallas ISD has opted to hire trained security guards instead of licensed police officers, both because of and because security guards typically cost less.

But even the cost of security guards is barely covered by HB 3’s funding, Temple ISD Superintendent Bobby Ott said. Hiring security guards across his 15-school district can cost up to $900,000, which would be on top of the $1.8 million needs to pay for all the required infrastructure updates, Ott said. The district only got $200,000 through HB3, and the state only awarded it $400,000 through the new grant program.

“I’ve always said that House Bill 3 has really just passed on debt to school districts,” he said.

The district can mitigate security guard costs by choosing the ” option in HB 3, Ott said. The program trains teachers to carry handguns in case of emergencies.

But critics have this approach, saying it introduces yet more guns into schools. Ott said his district doesn’t support a guardian program because police officers are ultimately trained to eliminate risks — and if an officer is called to one of his schools during an emergency, they might accidentally target a teacher who is carrying a gun.

Ott said it’s a “sad state of affairs” how lawmakers have approached school safety, especially given Texas’ this year.

“I agree with the safety requirements. They’re all fantastic, and they’re what schools need,” Ott said. “What I don’t agree with is sitting on the largest surplus that we’ve had in our economy [in Texas] and not providing funding to public schools.”

Hurdles with grant-based funding

Craig Bessent, assistant superintendent of school operations for , said his district has posted former law enforcement officers on its campuses since 2013 by paying them out of Wylie ISD’s general salary budget. This isn’t a feasible option for most underfunded school districts, he said.

Both the House and Senate’s failed school safety bills would have introduced additional grant money to help schools cover those expenses. But educators said a grant-based funding program poses extra logistical hurdles for schools and isn’t helpful in the long term. Bessent, who is also a board member appointed by Abbott, said grants work well for one-time expenses, such as building fences or securing doors.

“Once you hire someone, you’re trying to keep them on, just like teachers,” he said. “If you told a law enforcement officer, ‘I’m going to hire you, but you’re only going to for sure be here one year [with this grant]’… that’s not very good job security.”

Navigating a grant application process is also tough for smaller, rural schools, said Michelle Carroll Smith, superintendent of . Her rural district was able to submit an application since it has a temporary, grant-funded staff member to write funding applications, she said. But not all small districts have someone on staff to spearhead these processes.

“It comes with a lot of red tape,” Smith said. “Something as serious and important as safety and security should not be dependent on grants.”

Like many , Smith said seeing another legislative session end without additional school funding has left her frustrated and discouraged. Her district did not enter into a deficit budget this year but might have to if the Texas Legislature waits until the 2025 session to reconsider extra funding, she said.

“To pass bills and have mandates in them without adequate funding is irresponsible at best and political gamesmanship at worst,” she said of HB 3.

Superintendent Adrain Johnson said his rural district hired two full-time police officers for each of its campuses this year and purchased some security equipment like metal detectors. But the district is in a deficit budget and still needs an additional $500 million to meet the remaining safety requirements, he said.

Johnson said he particularly hopes to see more funding for mental health support in schools. Adding more security infrastructure and running regular active shooter drills can take a mental toll on students and staff, he said.

“When I visit the Capitol, I’m always pleased to see the strong security that exists there to protect democracy, to protect our legislators, to protect visitors, to protect us all,” Johnson added. “We want to see that same approach to our schools… because our education is part of our democracy, and it needs to be protected.”

This article originally appeared in at .

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

An important piece of ’s work focuses on improving the futures of Idaho youth, particularly those in rural communities. In a number of ways, AmeriCorps funding plays a key role in our programs.

Teach For America teachers are also AmeriCorps members. They can use Segal AmeriCorps Education Awards to pay for teacher certification or to pay down their existing student debt. Participation in AmeriCorps also enables them to defer their undergraduate loans for the first two years of teaching and have the interest, which accrues during those two years, paid off by the federal government.

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These awards help us recruit a more socio-economically diverse teaching force, which helps boost student learning in underserved communities. If this significant benefit were to disappear, it would have a strongly negative impact on our recruiting efforts. Since launching in Idaho in 2015, Teach For America teachers have reached more than 30,000 Idaho students.

It has been Teach For America’s experience that many individuals who want to serve, particularly as educators, are unable to do so. They face significant economic barriers, including high student debt and the cost of teacher certification, which make it difficult to enter a lower-paying profession such as teaching.

It’s important that people understand that beyond the overwhelmingly positive impact Teach For America has on students, our AmeriCorps members also gain a great deal of knowledge and experience from working with us. They frequently turn that experience into careers.

Former Teach For America teachers now work in all echelons of our state’s education system. Some are teachers, others are principals or school board members. Their experience in Idaho classrooms, made possible in part by AmeriCorps, represents only the beginning of their contributions to education in our state.

Idaho’s congressmenRep. Russ Fulcher and Rep. Mike Simpson should know that Idahoans value the programming made possible by the presence of AmeriCorps in our state.

Reducing its footprint would harm the people who need its services most. It is truly a hidden gem in the Gem State.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Idaho Capital Sun maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Christina Lords for questions: info@idahocapitalsun.com. Follow Idaho Capital Sun on and .