I do not believe that this massive increase in spending will meaningfully improve educational opportunity in Jersey City. Neither will it recognize the human right of parents to direct their children's education. Jersey City has over 3,000 vacant spaces available in privately managed schools that do a wonderful job of educating children at a fraction of the cost of our government schools. Both of these tuition levels are less than a third of what we spend in Jersey City's government schools of equivalent grade level. Let me expand on this latter point.
Charter schools are independently-managed public schools.
But charter schools receive no capital construction dollars from taxpayers. Instead, they must pay for their space needs out of their operating dollars. Because I wrote the proposal that, after compromise and amendment, became New Jersey's charter school law, it should come as no surprise that Jersey City leads the State in charter schools already operating, and has additional charter school applications pending. And again, the savings would be even larger if we closed our four old, 19th century schools and replaced them with charter schools. I think I've made my point.