Today Gov. Phil Murphy gave his annual budget address, outlining his fiscal plans for the 2023-2024 year. The full transcript is here. The speech emphasized Murphy’s desire to expand free full-day preschool, increase state school aid, fund high-dosage tutoring in grades K-12 to ameliorate learning loss in “our best-in-the-nation public schools,” and address the “national shortage of educators.”

Expanding Preschool:

“For the third year in a row, it has no new taxes and more middle-class tax relief. It will help hardworking families by expanding free pre-K for your kids. We will also continue our work toward universal pre-K with a more than $1 billion total investment, an increase of nearly $110 million over this current year.”

Increasing School Funding:

“But affordability doesn’t just come through what we can do, directly, for our families. Affordability is also found through the investments we can make to short-circuit rising taxes and costs in the first place. And no investment has such an impact as the one we make in our best-in-the-nation public schools.”

“Making this investment will mean that in our six years of working together we will have increased overall K-12 support to our schools by more than $2.6 billion. That’s a more than 30 percent increase.”

Addressing Learning Loss:

“This support is also critical not just for keeping our public schools the envy of the nation — and lifting up others — but it will also help districts and educators continue to turn around the learning loss we know occurred when the pandemic forced our students to move to remote learning. And to help push this effort further, this budget will commit $10 million more for high-impact tutoring to support the students who most need it. This ups our total investment in academic recovery to nearly $300 million.”

“If all this wasn’t enough — every penny we provide for our students, educators, and schools isn’t just an investment in the futures of our kids, communities, and economy, it’s also property tax relief that lifts more of the burden off the shoulders of local taxpayers.”

Widening the Teacher Pipeline:

“Right now, there is a nationwide shortage of new educators. We feel this ourselves. To pull more qualified folks into the profession, increase diversity, and begin closing our state’s educator shortage, this budget will support a total of $15 million in stipends for student-teachers and waiving of teacher-certification fees. These are two initial recommendations from my Public School Staff Shortage Task Force, and I am proud to put them forward in this budget.”