This morning’s Asbury Park Press has an article about Asbury Park Public Schools featuring superintendent Rashawn Adams, who complains about what he says are drastic cuts in state money. “We are expected to perform miracles,“ he emotes. “Give me another comparable district that has this plethora of social, emotional, economic and academic issues that Asbury Park has,” he challenges,” and tell me, put their scores up, then couple that with how much money we are sending out to charter schools.”

We’ll bite. Let’s use Lakewood Public Schools, another troubled district that NJ Ed Report readers are familiar with, and “put their scores up” side by side with Asbury, just like Adams says we should.

Here we go:

• According to the most recent state data, in Asbury Park 51% of students are economically-disadvantaged and 14% are English Language Learners (one of the “challenges” Adams points to in today’s article). 

• In Lakewood 82% of students are economically disadvantaged and 37% are English Language Learners. 

Given Asbury’s “plethora” of issues, let’s look at student proficiency levels.

• In one of Asbury Park’s elementary schools 12% of third-graders can read at grade-level and no Asbury Park student in elementary school reaches proficiency levels in math. (There may be a few but the state redacts the data if the percentage falls below 10%.) At Asbury Park High School 12.5% of students are proficient in reading and none are in math. On the 11th-grade state test called the NJGPA, the article says only 5% of students met expectations. (The state database redacts the data—probably because it’s 5%.)

• In Lakewood 37% of third-graders read proficiently and 31% of third-graders do math at grade-level. At Lakewood High School 34% of students pass the reading test and 24% pass the math test. Nineteen percent of students meet expectations on the NJGPA. 

In short, Lakewood’s third-grade reading proficiency level is three times that of Asbury. Plus high school juniors at Lakewood dramatically outperform Asbury high school juniors.

So Lakewood must have more money to burn, right? Surely, with its needier enrollment and higher scores, it’s working with higher levels of funding than Asbury.

Nope. Currently Asbury Park’s annual budgetary cost per pupil–that’s what Adams is complaining about, right?—is $27,977. 

Lakewood’s budgetary cost per pupil is $15,204. 

(The Press has Asbury’s 2023 cost per pupil at  $30,949; there are different ways of calculating per student costs and I’m using the more conservative “Taxpayers Guide to Educational Spending.“.)

In other words, Asbury Park spends almost twice as much per pupil as Lakewood yet has far worse outcomes.

That was too easy and of course it’s no game. Lakewood has a different set of fiscal woes, responsible as it is for transporting 50,000 private school students to 160 religious schools and providing those who “qualify” with special education services. (It gets by through loans from the state, currently totaling over $230 million. In fairness, last year Asbury Park got about $7 million in extra aid from the state.)

Adams complains Asbury loses money to charter schools–$13 million in tuition, he says. (The district doesn’t actually lose money because it never belonged to them in the first place; money follows the child, right? Too bad NJ has elected in its wisdom to use local traditional districts as a pass-through for charter tuition.)

But, okay, $13 million is tough, an increase of $2 million  from the year before. What’s going on? 

This: at College Achieve Greater Asbury Park, a public charter where 75% of students are economically disadvantaged (24% more than in the traditional district) and 17% are English Language Learners (3% more than the district), 49% of students pass the state reading test and 17% pass the math test, meeting all federal accountability benchmarks. (College Achieve in Asbury is in the process of adding grades and doesn’t have high school juniors yet so no data on the NJGPA.)

How much per year does the charter have to spend?

$16,579 per pupil; like Lakewood, about half of what Asbury Park spends.

It’s no secret why Mr. Adams is panicking: Despite warnings from educational economists, Asbury has been using federal emergency funding meant for COVID learning loss to cover payroll, and he’s not the only school leader doing so. That money runs out in a year, a time that analysts have labeled the “fiscal cliff.”

Also frightening him: enrollment continues to drop in Asbury Park: Senator Vin Gopal, who represents this part of Monmouth County and is Chair of the Senate Education Committee, told the Press the “district has lost hundreds of students over the last several years and funding is primarily based on enrollment.” 

Indeed, in 2020 total enrollment was 1,895 students and now it’s 1,608 students, a drop of 15%. If the trend continues, in another few years enrollment will fall below 1,300, the size of some middle schools and high schools.

Adams is correct that a tweak to the school funding formula, which caps property tax increases at 2%, doesn’t work for many districts because inflation and annual salary increases are higher than that. (Abbott/SDA districts like Asbury Park are exempt from that cap if the school funding formula finds them below “Adequacy”: Asbury is well above Adequacy in funding.). Yet there is some low-hanging fruit that distinguishes Asbury Park. How many districts with 1,600 students have both a Business Administrator and an Assistant Business Administrator? How many districts with four schools have six Supervisors of Curriculum and Instruction, plus a Director? Does the district really need a Supervisor of Special Services and a Supervisor of Student Services? How many Athletic Directors does Asbury Park need? 

Maybe the resources could be more wisely spent on remedial math courses for Asbury Park leaders..

Explainer: How Are Schools Funded in New Jersey, and Why Are My Property Taxes So High?