A New Jersey Appellate Court ruled on Monday that Gov. Murphy’s Education Commissioner, Angelica Allen-McMillan, cannot continue to delay her report on how the state can offer fair funding to Lakewood Public Schools.

“I think it’s a huge deal,” said Paul Tractenberg, co-counsel in a lawsuit first filed in 2014 against the state that demanded more school aid. “The commissioner’s plan was to drag this out for a year and a half.”

Currently Lakewood faces an impossible math problem: while the school funding formula is based on in-district students, almost 50,000 children in the city attend private Jewish day schools, also known as yeshivas. The district is required to pay for these non-public school students’ transportation, school security, textbooks, and costs of special education for yeshiva students with disabilities. Over the last half a decade the district has borrowed $173 million dollars from the state in loans that it will never pay back.

The Murphy Administration has argued, in the lawsuit referenced by Tractenberg, that the school funding formula is adequate for Lakewood’s needs. However, in May that Appellate Court ruled the district is “severely strained” by its obligation to provide transportation and special education to thousands of non-public school students and told Allen-McMillan to come up with an alternative funding plan, although it didn’t give her a deadline.

Now, nine months after the court order, Allen-McMillan says she is just beginning the task and it could take six months or longer.. This latest order from the court says she has to come up with a plan in four months.

Of course, Allen-McMillan will no longer be Acting Commissioner in four months: she announced her resignation last Friday, which will take effect on February 1st and Gov. Murphy has yet to nominate a successor. Tractenberg worries Allen-McMillan’s departure could further delay resolution, telling the Asbury Park Press, “the state may use that fact to say they need more time. We will resist that to maximum extent.”