In her push to lower taxes and make New Jersey more affordable, Gov. Mikie Sherrill is turning to a familiar idea.
The first-term Democrat is pushing to regionalize schools in a state with more districts than towns, a quirk of the Garden State that’s a major driver of its nation-leading property tax rates.
Those sky-high taxes have for decades vexed state leaders, who invariably bat around school and municipal consolidation as solutions. But as governors before Sherrill have learned, consolidation hasn’t typically delivered on its grand promise to meaningfully lower costs — and history shows most voters don’t want it.
Significant barriers — local resistance to giving up control, questions about real savings — suggest that Sherrill’s proposal could once again fall short.
“Consolidation is always easier to propose than it is to pull off,” New Jersey Education Association President Steve Beatty said. “But it’s one thing to make a proposal and something entirely different to do the hard work of convincing two or more communities to consolidate.”
That’s because New Jersey follows home rule, a constitutional framework that gives local governments the authority to govern their own schools and municipal services. As a result, one of the smallest states in the union has more school districts than California, the third largest, “raising costs on everybody,” according to Sherrill.
In practice, regionalization in New Jersey typically requires a state-approved feasibility study and school board discussions, and must ultimately be approved by voters in a local referendum.
“The biggest barriers to a regionalization are opposition from those who have a vested interest in continuing the system as it is,” said Mark Magyar, who previously oversaw regionalization efforts as a policy director for the Senate Democratic Majority Office. “Even when school boards and superintendents are fully on board, the laws on the books often make it difficult to justify regionalization.”
New Jersey has about 600 school districts. Former Govs. Jon Corzine, a Democrat, and Chris Christie, a Republican, also pushed consolidation to save money but had little success.
The last major push toward consolidation came in 2022, when former Gov. Phil Murphy signed a law aimed at encouraging mergers by funding feasibility studies and providing guidance on bargaining, salary guides and forming a new board of education.
But the results of Murphy’s efforts have been modest. By 2024–2025, the state had cut just nine operating districts from its pre-law total.
“It's easy for elected officials to say, ‘we should do this,’ because then if it doesn't happen, they can blame the voters,” said Marc Pfeiffer, who worked for more than 25 years in the state’s Division of Local Government Services.
Taken together, the limited change underscores how difficult voluntary consolidation has been in practice. But unlike Murphy and other past leaders who pushed incentives, Sherrill has signaled a willingness to go further.
“I’d start by offering the carrot to help the areas that want to consolidate,” she said at a debate in September. “But…we’ll have to start to look at compulsory movements.”
Sherrill has yet to detail what “compulsory movements” would mean in practice, and spokesperson Maggie Garbarino declined to comment on whether the idea is still on the table.
“When we are seeing school districts across the state struggle to keep up with rising costs, we have to consider all of our options with local stakeholders,” Gabarino said.
Meanwhile, Sherrill’s most recent budget proposal follows Murphy’s incentivization playbook, allocating $1 million for feasibility studies. While regionalization supporters are optimistic support from the governor means progress may finally be possible, New Jersey’s legal and political structure will make mandatory mergers difficult to achieve.
Decades of effort, little change
While home rule creates legal barriers to mandatory consolidation, funding challenges have also complicated the existing voluntary approaches.
New Jersey school districts are funded largely through local property taxes, with communities contributing different amounts based on their property wealth. When districts merge, those costs are spread across a newly combined district, meaning wealthier towns may end up paying more than they did before merging. That can make voter approval difficult even when consolidation may create broader cost efficiencies.
Lucille Davy, who served as the state’s education commissioner from 2005 to 2010, said that this dynamic has long been a key obstacle in advancing voluntary regionalization efforts.
“Nobody is going to be willing to voluntarily pay more in property taxes,” Davy said. “But at the end of the day, for every community that would pay more, there's going to be people that pay less. And the people that will pay less have probably been overpaying all this time.”
Sen. Vin Gopal, the Senate Education Committee chair, has been at the helm of the most recent push for regionalization. He sponsored a bill, NJ S4861 (24R), last November that would require executive county superintendents to create plans for merging districts with fewer than 500 students and creating regional districts.
Currently, about a third of the state’s 600 districts fall below that threshold. There is no official estimate for cost savings, but Gopal argues that merging them could save “hundreds of millions of dollars.”
The proposal did not advance out of the Senate last session but was intended, Gopal said, to “start the conversation.” He expects new legislation later this year focused again on small districts as well as underused school building and expanded regional special education programs.
Gopal acknowledged likely opposition from Republicans and other home rule advocates, but argued that taxpayers across the state should not have to bear the cost of districts that vote against consolidation.
However, some experts say the fiscal impact of these approaches — particularly the focus on districts with fewer than 500 students — would be limited.
Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University, estimates that only about 3 to 5 percent of taxable land parcels are in those districts — the primary targets for consolidation.
Magyar agreed that regionalization is unlikely to produce deep property tax cuts. But he argues that savings can accumulate “over time” through streamlined administration, shared services, and more efficient use of staff and resources.
The role of local buy-in
Where regionalization has succeeded, it has been driven largely by local consensus.
After years of feasibility studies and school board discussions, Monmouth County’s Henry Hudson Regional High School merged with the Atlantic Highlands and Highlands elementary school districts in 2024.
All three boards of education reached consensus on regionalization before voters approved the merger in a 2023 referendum.
Henry Hudson Superintendent Tara Beams credited the 2022 regionalization law with addressing uncertainties around financing and employment, helping to “pave the way” for the merger, which helped address “inefficiencies and roadblocks” in each district.
But ultimately, she said, the effort succeeded because it “was driven locally — not by someone from the outside.”
Beams said the district saw immediate savings as administrative services, staffing and technology systems were consolidated from three districts into one. The merged district also experienced a modest increase in state aid compared with the previous structure.
But she said the district did not receive all of the financial incentives it expected during the process, including reimbursement for referendum costs and certain state aid protections. Beams said disputes over eligibility requirements and unclear language in the law created additional complications.
Beams said current conversations around mandatory regionalization — including proposals like Gopal’s — fail to account for the importance of local buy-in and instead risk imposing “arbitrary, cookie-cutter” guidelines on districts without considering their individual needs.
“My concern is mandatory regionalization based on arbitrary numbers,” Beams added. “There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to this problem.”
Education leaders say regionalization should not be judged solely on cost savings, but on its impact on educational quality.
As Davy and other education leaders studied school funding reforms, she said they identified a “sweet spot” in district size, roughly 3,000 to 6,000 students. Districts in this range are large enough to afford specialized services like English language instruction or literacy support, but not so large that additional layers of bureaucracy dilute support and oversight.
“Children coming from different elementary schools in the same district may not have exactly the same experience either,” Davy said, “but they’ve had exposure to the same curriculum, materials, and expectations.”
That same dynamic can extend beyond academics, particularly in specialized programs.
Experts say regionalization can expand access to special education services — particularly in small districts that lack resources for specialized classrooms — allowing students to remain in their communities instead of being bused elsewhere.
At Henry Hudson, that shift is already underway.
Beams said that because all students now sit under a single budget and governance structure, the district has seen that continuity of curriculum and stronger service offerings. She added the schools can finally deploy staff and programs based on student need rather than the boundaries of three small budgets.
“This should 100 percent be about educational efficiency,” she said. “And when you finally have educational efficiency, you should immediately start to reap the benefits of financial stability and long‑term savings.”
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