This afternoon the New Jersey Department of Education released the dollar amounts of how much each school district will get in state aid for Fiscal Year 2024-25. Gov. Phil Murphy’s proposed FY2025 budget allots $11.6 billion in direct aid earmarked for public school districts. Four hundred twenty-two districts will see increases, 137 will see cuts, and 15 won’t see any changes.

The district with the largest increase is Newark, which will gain more than $101 million for its annual budget of about $1.3 billion. The district with the largest decrease is Long Branch, which will lose $10.4 million of its $120 million annual operating budget.

State school aid, the largest piece of the state budget, is calculated according to a formula called the School Funding Reform Act, or SFRA. The formula is complex but there are three main factors: The state calculates how much money is “adequate” to spend per pupil; the state figures out how much a district can rely on property taxes to pay for adequacy (“Local Fair Share”);  and the state makes it up the difference through “Equalization Aid.”  That last piece, Equalization Aid (you can find the line item if you look up your district budget) makes up the bulk of money that flows to schools from the state, although there are much smaller state and federal line items too.

This is the first year SFRA has been fully funded.

FY 2025 is especially complicated for school district throughout the nation. Many have been relying on the enormous infusion of federal COVID aid, which expires in the fall; while analysts warned districts to use the money only on “Non-Recurring Investments with Long-Term Impact” like statewide tutoring programs, summer schools, acceleration academies, and/or intensive academic boot-camps, mental health services, upgrades to technology and facilities, many used it for recurring investments like payroll. Districts will struggle to balance budgets without laying off staff members or making cuts in programming.

To look up your school district’s state aid allocation, go here.

Some examples:

Asbury Park: 20% decrease, or about $4 million less, for a total of $16,545,71

Bridgewater-Raritan: 8.5% increase, or $1.1 million more, for a total of $14.7 million.

Camden City: 4.4% increase, or $14.8 million more, for a total of $349 million.

Elizabeth: 9.4% increase, or $50 million more, for a total of $583 million.

Lakewood: 3.3% more, just under a million more, for a total of $27.5 million.

Jersey City: no change, for a total of $133.6 million

Montclair: 6.4% increase, or $560,000 more, for a total of $9.3 million.

Neptune Township: 35% decrease, or 4.5 million less, for a total of $8.5 million.

Newark: 8.8% increase, or about $101 million more, for a total of $1.25 billion.

Paterson: 10% increase, or $54 million more, for a total of $584 million.

Princeton: 9% increase, or $477K more, for a total of $5.8 million.

South Orange-Maplewood: 11% increase, or about $1 million, for a total of $10 million.