Atlantic City, New Jersey Public Schools Budget Is Outrageous

The Atlantic City Board of Education has approved a 2023-2024 annual budget of $ 288,811,772.

This is beyond outrageous, as it represents a price tag of nearly $ 50,000 per student.

By direct comparison, Egg Harbor Township Public Schools has 7,452 students and their annual budget is $165,991,632, about $ 22,000 per student.

Atlantic City has 6,214 students.

Doing the quick math … Egg Harbor Township has 1,238 more students and has a budget that is $122,820,140.00 less than Atlantic City.

The Atlantic City Public School system had 7,122 students in October 2015.

The Atlantic City Public School’s system has lost 908 students in less than 8 years. The trend is abysmal.

Below, are two interesting charts that tell the troubling Atlantic City educational delivery system story.

When you add the Atlantic City School budget and the City of Atlantic City budget … it totals more than $ 500,000,000 million per year.

The annual spending behemoth is for a city with less than 40,000 residents.

Yet, for all of this outrageous spending, Atlantic City is not clean, safe and the schools are poorly performing.

By direct comparison, The Atlantic County Institute of Technology just received the top ranking in Atlantic County by the State of Jersey Department of Education.

During yesterday’s on-air interview with John Devlin, The Dean of Atlantic City Board of Education, Devlin stated that “the statistics show that La’Quetta Small is the worst performing Superintendent in Atlantic City history.”

Devlin was the only Atlantic City Board of Education member who voted against the $ 288,811,772 2023-2024 budget.

The bloated budget passed 5-1, the bare number of votes that it needed to pass.

Until a few months ago, it would have required 6 affirmative votes, however, Small was successful in removing the Ventnor City sending district member removed from the Atlantic City Board of Education.

In order to have a sending district representative on the Atlantic City Board of Education, they just have a minimum of 10 percent of the high school population.

Ventnor currently has 161 students who attend Atlantic City High School. This represents 9.15 percent of the overall 1,760 high school students.

Atlantic City pounced on this and had the Ventnor representative removed from their board by successfully petitioning the state of New Jersey Department of Education.

Ventnor City pays the Atlantic City Board of Education more than $ 4,000,000 per year. They deserve and have earned the right to have representation on the Atlantic City Board of Education.

This injustice - the equivalent of taxation, without representation - should be remedied by the state of New Jersey.