Paterson Public Schools is in a bind. The proposed 2024-2025 budget to educate about 25,000 students is $710.4 million, $53.7 million more than last year, and that will require an 8% tax hike for residents. Why the big increase? Salaries and benefits are up to $372 million and so are various line items—vocational programs, busing, out-of-district tuition for students with disabilities, and increased charter school tuition. Also, the district has 140 teaching vacancies and relies extensively on substitutes.

North Jersey reports that the Paterson Board of Education is considering changing staff health insurance from Blue Cross/Blue Shield to Aetna to save money, although there is an assumption that state aid will increase by $34 million. Here is the president of the Paterson Education Association, John McEntee:

“McEntee said sudden changes in coverage would ‘drive talented individuals away’ and create instability that would undermine efforts to improve the quality of education in Paterson schools. The union president said some city teachers ‘out of desperation’ were doing virtual job interviews from their cars during breaks in their class schedules.

‘Teachers are leaving. It’s really sad,’ Clara Basyurt, who teaches at School 25, told the school board last week. ‘The reason is because of things like this.’”

Students are leaving too. This is because their parents have other options. Who can blame them? In Paterson district schools, 13.8% of third-graders can read at grade-level, a drop of 1.6% since last year, despite all that federal emergency aid. Five and a half percent of sixth-graders are proficient in math.

But Paterson is also home to six charter schools where student achievement is higher than traditional district schools, despite having more students who are economically-disadvantaged. Here is one example: at College Achieve Paterson where 94% of students are low-income, 49.5% of third-graders are proficient in reading (a 15 point increase from last year) and 34.8% of sixth-graders are proficient in math (a 19 point increase from last year). Thus, enrollment in Paterson’s charter school sector has jumped by 67% over the past five years, from 3,677 students in 2018 to 6,013 students in 2023.

The district now has to sent more state money to charters to account for the enrollment increase. (New Jersey, unfortunately, uses traditional districts as pass-throughs for charter tuition, a sure recipe for animus even though the district keeps a percentage for administrative costs.) This feels like a big bite out of the district’s wallet even though it was never the district’s money in the first place. Next year Paterson is projecting an allocation of $123,434,158 in total tuition to city charter schools.

Last spring the Paterson Board of Education hired a Memphis-based firm to convince parents to send their children back to the district. The Paterson Charter School Roundtable “welcomed the district’s recruiting efforts, saying the whole purpose of charter school is to create competition among educational institutions.”

Paterson will have to get a little more competitive in teacher retention too.