Personally, I have a knee-jerk aversion to voting for the developer-backed slate, but I do have a hard time wrapping my head around a billion dollar budget to educate 27,000 students. $37,000 per student is a massive amount of money, more than triple the national average, 80% higher than the state average, and according to a 2021 Independent Budget Office report, about 20% more spending per student than New York City.

What makes this a reasonable amount of money? Our much higher than average educational outcomes? Are there specific challenges that Jersey City faces that make it uniquely uneconomical to school our kids? Can we address such challenges in other ways than increasing taxes? I can imagine we face a unique challenge in being both a high cost-of-living area as well as a relatively small municipality in terms of our total buying power, should we examine something like having schools funded and run at the county level rather than the city level?

Education matters. So does affordability. We won't have to worry about public schools if working families can't afford to live here.