In one of its final and most consequential acts before leaving office, the Phil Murphy administration is moving to take over the financially distressed Lakewood public school system — a dramatic intervention that would strip the locally elected school board of authority and install a state-appointed monitor with sweeping powers, the New Jersey Globe reports.
An Order to Show Cause is expected to be filed as early as today by New Jersey Education Commissioner Kevin Dehmer, initiating a legal process that could place Lakewood under full state control. The timing — just six days before Murphy exits office — appears designed to shield incoming Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill from having to launch the takeover herself.
State officials say Lakewood’s fiscal condition has deteriorated beyond repair under its current governance structure, following more than a decade of multi-million-dollar annual deficits, ballooning transportation and special-education costs, and repeated emergency “loans” from the state that the district has been unable to repay.
Critics describe the district as functionally insolvent — kept afloat year to year by state bailouts, with no realistic path to long-term stability.
Lakewood is unique in New Jersey — and nearly unparalleled nationally. More than 40,000 children attend over 180 private schools in the township, almost all of them Orthodox Jewish institutions, while roughly 5,000 students are enrolled in the public school system. By contrast, New Jersey’s statewide private-school enrollment average is about 14 percent.
The imbalance has produced a budgetary reality that advocates and watchdogs say is unsustainable: the Lakewood Board of Education now spends more on busing private-school students than on classroom instruction for its own public-school students.
Public schools — whose student population is primarily made up of children from communities of color — face crowded classrooms, weaker academic outcomes, and chronic underinvestment. “Public-school kids are bearing the cost of a system that was never designed for them,” one longtime observer said.
Transportation mandates for private schools, combined with the district’s unusually high volume of costly special-education placements — many of them out of district — have pushed expenses far beyond what the local tax base or state aid formula can support.
A 2014 state investigation raised alarms about lax oversight of special-education contractors, questionable approvals for private placements, and potential conflicts of interest. At the time, then-Gov. Chris Christie opted against a full takeover, choosing limited intervention instead.
State officials now say that decision merely postponed the reckoning.
Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill has publicly backed the use of state monitors in fiscally distressed districts, including in Montclair, her hometown, where schools are grappling with extraordinary financial problems of their own.
If the Murphy administration’s petition succeeds, Lakewood would join a small but consequential list of districts placed under state control. Camden was taken over in 2013 under Christie; Newark and Paterson in the 1990s; Jersey City in 1989. In each case, the return to full local control took more than a decade.
For Lakewood, that could mean years — if not generations — of state oversight, with a monitor empowered to override the school board on budgets, contracts, staffing, and policy.