Two well-articulated letters about local educational systems in the Jersey Shore were published in the July 31, 2025 edition of The Coaster. One explained the specific efforts in Asbury Park Schools to address past failures and meet students’ needs, with the intrusion of local politics towards those efforts. The other described a significant shortfall in state funding in Neptune Township that will negatively impact staffing, student programming, and student services.

Both letters suggest a pervasive problem getting worse in the NJ Public Schools.

With the dismantling of the US Department of Education and cuts in financial and programmatic support for students with disabilities, and with school lunch programs under threat, these problems are exacerbated by the recent bill passed by Congress that will take families off Medicaid and SNAP, with anticipated ICE seizures of foreign-born 'undocumented' students from and within our schools. This should be of great concern to the residents, parents in particular, school administrators, and boards of education in Monmouth County, NJ, and our State Public School Systems, with the new school year less than a month away.

To paraphrase Walt Kelly’s comic strip, Pogo, substituting “he” for “it”– ‘We have met the enemy, and it is us.’

For decades, New Jersey’s school funding has been at issue. (https://www.insidernj.com/justice-must-define-school-funding-formula/)

There are solutions to the glut and disparity in size of NJ School Districts, some being a single school and some encompassing a major city.

First is to recognize the hard reality that NJ school districts are silos of self-perpetuation – organizations of bounded community mores, protected status, often seen in sports prowess and SES.

With a superabundance of school districts, with student size of 275 (Monmouth Beach) to close to 9,000 (Middletown) in Monmouth County, and over 600 school districts in the state, (https://www.nj.gov/education/doedata/fact.shtml), no wonder there are funding problems and inefficiencies, and an increase in charter school options. Under this scenario, providing a so-called Thorough and Efficient Education for NJ public school students becomes beyond challenging.

Additionally, with the Trump overreach, not limited to book censorship and banning, and rewriting curriculum that fictionalizes the history of slavery as one example, NJ School Districts can buckle and conform or take actions to safeguard our freedoms under the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Sharing legal services, as many universities and colleges nationwide do, is one suggested approach.  The cost for some of these services, such as those provided by the Lakewood, NJ Public School attorney over several years, with no or little accountability was staggering.  That is just one example. Who pays? The municipal taxpayer.

For cost savings measures and public safety NJ Municipalities have combined police departments. This is another example of shared services that forward looking school districts could and should put in place.

A confederation of neighboring school districts under one governance and superintendent would mean fairer, merit based, and more standard based hiring practices, with opportunities to use best practices in curriculum, assessment, teaching and learning for all students. It will enable cost-effective budgeting to provide better efficiencies and student services via cost sharing across the board, not limited to contracts, compensation, purchasing and providing necessary and enhanced student programming.

Examples include sharing special education services, diminishing the need for private special education services unless in exceptional circumstances, state of the art evidence-based staff development, and schools of choice modeled after successful magnet school systems.

School governance via boards of education would no longer be insular. Residents of various municipalities would collaborate to improve student services and learning.

And finally, the students would have access to a more diverse peer group, and experience and learn to know and care for one another based on common and evolving interests and endeavors. In the spirit of Brown v. Board of Ed. (1954), our NJ public education system via purposeful consolidation would become places where students could work, play, learn and break bread together; that is, grow, support, thrive, and know one another.

Jonathan Shutman, Ed.D.

Ocean, NJ