New Jersey: 17% of students have special needs; districts struggling "to absorb costs"
- Sep 29, 2025
- 2 min read
Sept 26, 2025, NJ Spotlight News: Rising cost of special education stresses NJ schools
About 17% of NJ students are enrolled in special education programs
Many districts, like Toms River, have struggled to absorb those costs.
“It’s not just the classification, it’s the types of classification that we see in students, that these students are coming with a lot more needs,” Toms River Superintendent Michael Citta said. “When you look at out of district tuition, it’s gone up 55%. When you look at occupational and physical therapy, just related services, extra services, has gone up 70%. There’s no controls on any of these line items for the services for the kids and it’s become unaffordable. We’re only being funded one third, 33%, of what we should be getting back on that.”
The state funds special education in two ways – first from the general education budget that allocates state aid to districts via the School Funding Reform Act. The second is an allocation called special education extraordinary aid.
“Extraordinary special education is any student or case that’s over $40,000 that a district needs to spend,” said Senate Education Committee Chair Vin Gopal (D-Monmouth). “If you have a student that really needs specialized attention, maybe needs an IEP, maybe needs 2 to 3 people to help, you could be looking at over $100,000 that the district needs to pay for out-of-placement.”
Students are placed out-of-district when their needs are greater than what the school can provide. The school funding formula requires districts get reimbursed 90% of what they spend on extraordinary aid, including transportation, which has been significant cost driver in recent years. But right now, districts are only getting back about 60%. Gopal has drafted a bill, S-3917, that, among other things, would establish a task force to review the state’s special education funding model.
“I think that New Jersey really needs to pick up the costs for extraordinary special education costs,” Gopal said.
Danielle Farrie, research director at the Education Law Center, said she would also like to see the state move away from a census model of funding special education through the general budget.
“Every district is funded as if they have the average classification rate, so that means some districts are getting a little more funding than the special ed students they actually have enrolled,” Farrie said. “And some are getting less funding if they have classification rates higher than the state average. We sort of moved halfway there this budget season by funding districts in the FY26 budget by their actual count. But they’re still only getting the statewide average per-pupil. A lot of people have suggested moving back to a tiered model, which is what a lot of other states use where, depending on the level of services that the student needs, they get a different per-pupil amount. So that would alleviate some of the pressure on the districts.”
It’s an issue that Gopal says he’ll be taking up in this lame duck session of the Legislature.
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