The governor's call for 'fairness' in school funding is again met with a mix of enthusiasm, skepticism and protests.
BORDENTOWN CITY -- Gov. Chris Christie's sixth public appearance to promote his plan to redistribute state aid to schools was again met with strenuous protests on Tuesday.
And the governor said those protests only proved there needs to be change.
Even before he appeared before the 150 people crowded into the Hope Hose Humane Fire Company 1, more than 100 people, many of them teachers, ringed the firehouse protesting the governor's call for a fixed $6,599 in state aide per student.
Inside the firehouse, Christie said he relished their onslaught and promised: "The day of reckoning has come."
"You will continue to see liberal editorial pages and special interest groups yell and scream that they need more money," said Christie, as passing cars sounded their horns at the crowds outside.
"I've never met an interest group that didn't need more money," he said. "I am the one who has to say no. That's what you hired me to do. I can guarantee you, when you say no, you are never popular with the group you say no to."
Christie's office says his proposed education funding formula would reduce property tax burden by an average of $1,900 per household in Bordentown city.
Bordentown's mayor, Republican Joseph R. Malone, said he would welcome such a reversal after decades of ever-increasing property taxes.
"We are dying," said Malone.
His dark grey suit jacket doffed in the August heat, the governor quickly took aim at a favorite target, the city of Asbury Park, which he noted spends $33,000 per student, nearly double the state average. But the city has a graduation rate 20 percentage points lower than Bordentown's, Christie said.
Taxpayers shouldn't have to "pay for failure."
Outside, Marie Corfield, an art teacher from the Flemington-Raritan school district protesting the governor's proposal, laughed at the suggestion that the governor's formula included the word "fairness."
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"You can't educate students who are getting occupational and speech therapy, who are getting free or reduced (price) lunches, who have limited proficiency in English, who have a whole host of developmental and learning disadvantages, for the same price as a student who is coming in 100 percent equipped to learn," said Corfield, who gained fame after confronting Christie at a town hall meeting in 2010.
It was a complaint echoed inside by a woman at Christie's event who noted that the governor's own former commissioner of education and current superintendent of the state-controlled Newark school district, Christopher Cerf, warned on Monday that the formula's 60 percent budget cuts would be "cataclysmic" to Newark.
"You can't get blood from a stone," said a woman in the crowd who worried that cash-strapped, lower-income cities like Camden wouldn't be able to make up the difference.
Christie acknowledged that the 'fairness formula' was, in part, an effort at slashing what he said was a bloated bureaucracy that serves as "an employment agency for everybody's aunt, uncle and second cousin."
He pointed to cuts made in the state-controlled Camden school district, which had slashed administrative and back office staff by 50 percent in the three years since it assumed control.
"I am trying to force change here," said Christie.
He said that despite their disagreements about funding Newark, Cerf "agrees that what's much more injurious to Newark are the work rules...that allow for 'first-in/last out'" that value seniority over merit."
Christie, who has just a year and a half left on his term, said he was only willing to take on education reform because he was term-limited from running again, and could do so without fear.
"I'm not running for anything," said Christie. I don't care anymore. I got nothing else to prove. Except I gotta finish the job."
Claude Brodesser-Akner may be reached at cbrodesser@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @ClaudeBrodesser. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.