HAMMONTON BLOG

Governor Corzine's proposed school funding plan goes before both houses today for approval. All indications are that this proposal will pass. That would be great news for the taxpayers of Hammonton, as we have been one of the districts in the State that have been hurt the most by the lack of adequate funding by the State over the last 6 years. Under the current proposal, Hammonton would get and additional $2,127,000 for the 2008-2009 school year. That means that over the last two years, Hammonton has received an additional $4,170,307 in aid from the State to run our schools. Our aid has increased 46.3% in the last two years.
One fact that may be overlooked by some, is that this is not all of the aid we are entitled to. Under the proposal the Governor put forward to fund schools going forward, Hammonton's aid from the State for the 2008-2009 school year should be $15,270,000 or an additional $2,508,000 for next year. Click here to see figures from an Atlantic City Press report. To make the plan a little bit easier to swallow, there is a cap for the largest increase a district can receive at 20%. But also under this plan, the same type of cap would exist each year until the district eventually reaches the full amount of funding it should have from the State. Hopefully this means Hammonton can look forward to an additional $2,552,400 in next years aid package.
This all brings the bigger picture back into focus for the Town of Hammonton. After years of finger pointing and false accusations in the Town of Hammonton, we finally have proof that the lack of lawful State aid over the last 6 years has created the financial problems for the Hammonton School District. If you take the recent increases in State aid into account, Hammonton's increase would have equaled approximately 83 cents when converted to the local tax rate. We would have had 83 cents worth of money in the school budget to help run the district. When you look at the actual tax increases since the year 2001, the School tax increase has only been 52.7 cents. That equals a more than 30 cent reduction in taxes to the Hammonton taxpayers over this period. The previous school board had said that taxes would stabilize once the school was finished as long as the State funding formula stayed the same. Now we can see that was more than true, since the amount of state aid significantly surpasses the increases that were passed on to the taxpayers.
We wish to congratulate our Democratic Governor Corzine for stepping up to the plate and make great strides to fix a problem that hit Hammonton harder than most districts in New Jersey.

-- Edited by Admin at 10:44, 2008-01-07