The Press of Atlantic City gets it!

The Press of Atlantic City should be commended for writing about the problems of the Christie-Legislature policy of not letting any district lose state aid no-matter-what.

The focus of this article by Diane D'Amico is that Interdistrict Choice districts that have lost Choice students are being allowed to keep money for non-existent students through Additional Adjustment Aid. Additional Adjustment Aid, aka, Phantom Student Aid, allows many Choice districts, including high-resource ones like Deal, Hoboken, and Englewood are being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars each for phantom students, while hundreds of NJ districts that have seen residential student population growth see no increases and aid declines in real terms.

“Enrollments change, and now some districts are getting money for students who are not there, and others are not getting money for additional students,” she said. “Everything gets exaggerated when they do flat funding. The more time goes by, the more extreme it gets.”