Mandating School District Consolidation Means Lower Property Taxes

By Vin Gopal

Senator Vin Gopal

We can preserve the high quality public education New Jersey school districts offer and reduce the cost to taxpayers by consolidating school districts and through shared service agreements.

This isn’t a new idea. But it’s been too slow to catch on.

We’ve seen the positive impact that eliminating duplication through regionalization and shared services can have on reining in property taxes, but relatively few districts have moved to merge with their neighbors and costs remain too high.

Roughly $11.7 billion of the current $56.7 billion state budget is going toward school funding, the single largest pool of expenses in the state’s 2025 fiscal year. We really feel the impact on the local level. In 2022 nearly 53 percent of the more than $32.2 billion that towns and counties collected in property taxes went to schools, according to the Department of Community Affairs.

We just can’t afford to continue operating 600 individual school districts anymore.

It’s time to consider mandating school consolidation to reduce overall operating costs and shared services to reduce administrative costs as well as those for professional services, like attorneys and engineers. As chair of the Senate Education Committee, I am tasking my colleagues to take up a bipartisan examination of requiring that school districts that can save by consolidating to merge, or join shared service agreements with other districts to reduce costs.

The state has tried to incentivize school districts to merge, especially those with falling enrollment and rising costs. In 2022, New Jersey 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.

The Senate Education Committee will ensure school districts are involved in regionalization decisions. Any effort to mandate consolidation must include a lot of local input and the Education Committee will engage local educators, municipal governments and parents in the conversation.

We need to put everything on the table. We need to look at how we can 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 to cut professional expenses.

We hope to have a consolidation bill drafted by October or November, after we finish getting input later this month on reworking New Jersey’s school funding formula, which will be separate legislation.

We know mandating consolidation will draw some opposition. New Jersey is a strong home rule state, but as enrollment continues to decline statewide, the cost of maintaining certain districts will become increasingly inefficient, if not unsustainable. We also know that rising property taxes are forcing some residents, especially seniors, out of their lifelong homes and in some cases out of our state.

New Jersey is a national leader in the quality of our public education. And quality is something we must never compromise.

We believe that we can maintain the highest standards in education and still address the cost. Consolidation and sharing services are the best approaches to accomplishing academic excellence and affordability.

This is the start of a conversation that desperately needs to happen in New Jersey.