RED BANK: AID CUTS REKINDLE CHARTER DEBATE

Red Bank Superintendent of Schools Jared Rumage at Wednesday night’s strategic planning kickoff. (Photo by Brian Donohue. Click to enlarge.)

By BRIAN DONOHUE

A massive proposed cut in state aid to Red Bank schools threatens to reignite a long-simmering debate that has boiled over repeatedly in the past decade: should a small town of 13,000 people pay to support both a public school district and a charter school?

Red Bank Charter School Head of School Kristen Martello, center, in August, 2022. (Photo by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge.)

The Red Bank borough school district, which runs the 1,200-student primary school and middle school, was blindsided by a $1.7 million cut in state aid announced amid the Murphy administration’s massive boost in school funding last month. 

The cuts repeat a pattern over the past decade in which the district says it has been shortchanged a total of $44 million.   

District officials have urged state officials to restore the funding, with Superintendent Jared Rumage  testifying before the Senate Education Committee in Trenton Thursday. 

Meanwhile, Rumage also is stressing how the financial crunch is worsened, because the district has to forward millions annually to the Red Bank Charter School, regardless of how much it gets from the state. 

It’s a two-way squeeze few, if any, smaller districts in the state find themselves in, Rumage said.

“We must address the gross inequity caused by the rigidness of the current funding formula and the failure of leaders to eliminate the fiscal redundancies of financing two school districts (the Red Bank Borough Public Schools and Red Bank Charter School) in a small community like Red Bank,” Rumage wrote in a message posted to the district’s web site Monday. 

Last year, the school district passed along just over $3 million to pay for the charter school, budget figures show. 

“You cannot find a community of our size in the entire state with this type of educational system,” Rumage said.

At a strategic planning session meeting Wednesday night, Rumage put a “unified school district” on a list of three top goals for the district, along with consolidating pre-k into a single facility and a establishing a stable level of state aid.

Red Bank Charter School head of school Kristen Martello pushed back against the idea. 

 “It is disappointing that there has been a cut to Red Bank Borough Schools’ state aid,” she wrote in an email to redbankgreen. “However, to scapegoat Red Bank Charter School for this cut in state aid is a red herring.”

Martello cited several statistics charter school parents and supporters have pointed to over the years, notably streams of funding for facilities and other budget items the district receives but RBCS does not.

Both the charter and district schools feel the pain of the state’s unpredictable  funding schemes, Martello said.

“Funding has been a major challenge for both district schools and charter schools and we are supportive of efforts to increase funding equity for our public education system,” she wrote. “Since charter school payments are derivative of the school funding formula, when Red Bank Borough’s funding declines, payments to Red Bank Charter School also decline.”

Rumage countered that decline is not dollar-for-dollar. A 20-percent cut in state aid, for example, may result in a far smaller percentage drop in charter school payments, he said. 

It’s a debate that has roiled the town time and again. 

In 2021 the Borough Council unanimously passed a resolution calling for the non-renewal of the Red Bank Charter School’s charter.

The borough board of ed had earlier approved its own resolution in opposition to the charter renewal while calling for a unification of the two systems.

Despite the effort, the state renewed the school’s five-year charter in February 2022.

Similar battle lines were drawn in 2016 when the 200-student charter school proposed an expansion that would have doubled its size.

After an emotional and bitter debate, the charter school’s application to expand was denied by the state Department of Education.

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