Subject: Report Concludes Jersey School Districts Are Wasting A Lot of Taxpayer Dollars: (from Millennium Radio) A new study finds Jersey school districts are wasting a huge amount of money, because they're not coordinated in any kind of a unified fashion, and they're often unaware of what neighboring districts with similar needs are doing. Jay Williams, the Managing Director of the Grand Institute, a for-profit research group, says after analyzing Department of Education data covering 549 school districts "we found 2-point-7 billion dollars in inefficient recourse allocation." He says a big part of the problem is "we don't treat the 618 school districts in New Jersey as a system- local decisions are made and they're not made in context to what other districts are spending…there's many districts that spend only 6 or 7 thousand dollars per sReport Concludes Jersey School Districts Are Wasting A Lot of Taxpayer Dollar student, so that means the district that's spending 12 thousand is 5 thousand dollars inefficient." Williams adds the system needs to be changed because "home rule does not trump public good - home rule is a political designation- there's nothing in the State Constitution that says home rule should be more important than the public good." He suggests that by cutting staffing levels over time, districts could begin to save a substantial amount of money.

RESPONSE: The failure to push for decision making to be at a County level demonstrates a total lack of leadership...especially in the area of contract bargaining. Why the failure to take up this cudgel is hard to understand. Home-rule is a non-existent concept in the State Constitution. The major lacking in every town...seems to be a dearth of leadership...and again the way New Jersey funds education is a hoax on the middle class perpetrated by Republicans.