Frustration Builds in N.J. Funding Debate

Districts increase push for revised aid formula, amid continuing delays.

Fed up with five years of flat funding and aid calculations they see as unfair, school districts across New Jersey are pressing education leaders to rewrite the state’s school funding formula. The governor has called repeatedly for a better aid plan. But the timeline for its completion has grown only longer.

Gov. Jon S. Corzine, a Democrat, hoped to have a new funding formula in place for the 2007-08 school year, but that has been delayed until 2008-09 while policymakers and advocates debate the figures and factors that should shape the aid framework. In the meantime, frustration is mounting in the districts.

“We need a school funding formula and we need it, like, yesterday,” said Lynne Strickland, the executive director of the Garden State Coalition of Schools, which says that its members, middle- and upper-income districts, have been forced to rely on local property taxes for up to 90 percent of their budgets because the state’s share of school funding—37...