Introduction
From the beginning of the year 1821, the US has decided to give each youngster the chance to acquire the education that is equal to all learners for free (Watson, 2008). The question that needs to be answered is, how much funding does each district and school in New Jersey get and where does the funding go? To run every public school in this state, there exist many models of funding to be used depending on the location of the school, the level of need for learners and many other factors. The need to calculate and increase the amount of funding caused a change in the funding model, and this is done to better education acquisition opportunities for all students. Therefore districts in the New Jersey need appropriate funding models to cater for special education needs for learners.
The changes on funding strategy
In the year 1970, America established laws that stated the need for all learners to be exposed to equal learning modalities (Gore, 2017). In the recent past, Freehold Township, a culturally diverse and populated densely, has gotten attention from others on the based on funding needs. All this was due to the lack of state funding. The township’s elementary school was founded to have not been upgraded or renovated for over forty years. The elementary school has no walls; the open space is divided into classrooms by whiteboards and other items. During April of 2017, the school district had enough and had agreed to sue the state of New Jersey to receive the money owed (Rouse, 2017).
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The state of New Jersey is build up of 21 districts. Throughout the state, there are many different communities which practice different beliefs. As part of the reform in school funding, the funding act of the year 2008, New Jersey made changes on how education including special education was funded. Before the year 2008, all education students in the New Jersey were funded by the level of need identified. Each pupil was put into one of the four designated need tiers, and each higher per-pupil funding was linked with more need tiers. In addition to education funding, a recent research study revealed that the New Jersey had higher per-student spending for special education as compared to the national average. The research study suggested that changing to a census-founded education funding for all learners with general and special need will help the New Jersey manage its spending on education funding.
In the year 2008, the state opted to make some changes and switched to using a census-based strategy. Under this strategy of the census-based model, all learning institutions are funded for similar percentages of needy education learners. For the years 2008 to 2009 through 2010 to the year 2011, the funding percentage was found to be approximately 15%. The stated percentage is exclusive of learners getting speech aid services. They are funded separately using a different model. Each of the district's funding on education, not including exemplary help, is calculated by multiplying the resident population of learners in the district by 15% to get the number of needy education learners to fund. The resultant funded value is again multiplied by the need education per student funding value to get the total need education amount allocated to each district. The new system of census-based then equalizes two over three of the value obtained, splits it up to a position and local divide. The remaining one over three is funded entirely from the state.
The process of wealth equalization used here is commonly used in education funding calculations that find the percentage of funding the state is paying founded inversely on the wealth relative to every individual district. For the districts known to be rich, the state opts to give them little funding percentage. It can be noted that each district receives an exemplary amount of funding for special need learners as they are considered expensive and extraordinary to serve. This funding is beyond the general needy education funding. When the funding structure changes were put into action, a comprehensive review of its possible impacts was mandated.
In the year 2010, the department of education (DOE) in New Jersey gave out the Request for Qualifications to research the effects of the changes in funding with the exclusive authorization to the commissioner for self-governing research on education census funding criteria. This was meant to identify if the changes in education funding calculations would be needed in the future to counter the differences in the cases of highly need education learners and special need learners and recommend any changes. It is essential to remember that the research was not meant to check on the effectiveness of the general level of education funding in the New Jersey. Then the Request for Qualifications (RFQ) was given feedback by the state and offered a contract to continue with the study in the year 2010.
The proposal for the continued research by Request for Qualifications established a multi-tier strategy to examine where the funding goes. The primary objective was to determine the need levels that need high funding costs to each district, however, occurring at low levels of incidences. Once the levels were determined, the identification of districts that had more than the usual rates of need was done. Also, an analysis was needed on the effects the new funding system would have on these districts. Once the effects were well understood, recommendations would be outlined in connection with the high-cost incidence levels.
Part of the tasks to be done during the research by RFQ included coming up with a comprehensive database at the district level of funding counts and financial information. Also, reviewing the literature study on the need levels that were high-cost and low-cost occurrences as well as reviewing few of other states education funding strategies and the methods they used for accounting for the high cost and low-cost phenomena was needed. The RFQ as well identified the low incidence and the high-cost special need education funding by using the data obtained from state reviews and analyzing detailed documented databases.
Conclusion
To find the best funding method and determine how much each school in the New Jersey could get, a comprehensive study involving interviews with representatives from each district will be essential. Two sets of interviewing, one focusing on detailed questions about the new method of education funding and the other based high and low-cost incidence level will work best. From there, recommendations will be made founded on state literature review, analysis of information and interviewing process.
References
Gore, J. E. (2017). Dominant Beliefs and Alternative Voices: Discourse, Belief, and Gender in American Study . Routledge.
Rouse, C. E. (2017). The community college: Educating students at the margin between college and work. Journal of economic Perspectives , 13 (1), 63-84.
Watson, J. (2008). Blended Learning: The Convergence of Online and Face-to-Face Education. Promising Practices in Online Learning. North American Council for Online Learning .
