Your editorial, "School Budgets Take Hit in Four Districts" (Tri-Town News, April 26, 2007), raises the false hope that putting a new state school funding formula in place for the 2008-09 school year will result in meaningful and effective reform (relief) of the property tax burden on New Jersey municipalities and their school districts.

The chief ingredient of the reformulation is assumed to be a "fairer" reallocation of state aid between the Abbott districts and the non-Abbott districts. Trenton politicians, like all politicians, are not prone to cut their political throats by taking funds away from the Abbott districts to distribute elsewhere. You are necessarily assuming without so stating that the state income tax will go up to generate the tax funds to be reallocated to the non-Abbotts in the zero sum game of school district funding.

To start with, seniors (retired or still working) and certainly young families with children in "starter" homes lumped into the description "house rich and cash poor" are paying state income taxes. Many young professional families with no children and no plans to raise any in the near future have bought and are buying "McMansions" (large four- and five-bedroom houses starting at $500,000 and up) as investments that they plan to turn over in three to five years when they move on to the next rung on their career ladders.

Boosting their income taxes to feed the raging tax and spend fever of the school districts is not going to be viewed as cost-effective property tax reduction. Nor will that gimmick sit well with the bulk of the working professional and middle class, least of all our wannabe elitist school lobby camp followers.

These worthies have expressed ill-contained Schadenfreude at the prospect of the coming revaluation here in Jackson tilting more of the property tax burden onto the very oldtimer house-rich seniors (voters) all seem concerned about.

Worst of all, the proposed tax shift will inevitably eliminate local control of the school establishment's runaway budgets. State income tax funding will be controlled from Trenton and not subject to local voter approval. Do we really want to give control over the two-thirds (and skyrocketing) of our local taxes devoted to paying for the schools to a set of faceless Trenton education bureaucrats totally outside our direct control? We doubt it and so do the vast majority of local voters.

Effective, long-term property tax relief must begin with the firm realization that property taxes will never be brought under control, let alone reduced, until the skyrocketing school budgets are contained, stabilized and made transparent to taxpayers.

Every New Jersey school board arrogantly assumes it and its parochial administrative cadres are better qualified than recognized state and national education authorities to define curriculum content requirements and tailor them to their students. In keeping with the politically correct culture, diversity in approach is promoted over and above the core curriculum standards. So we get costly fragmentation in the place of economies of scale through standardization.

The tacked-on "local variant" patches are proclaimed "valuable programs" to be defended to the last taxpayer home equity dollar.

Contrary to your editorial opinion on recent school budget capping legislation, the New Jersey legislators have recognized the loose cannon on the deck of the New Jersey education ship and applied increasingly effective brakes to the runaway school budgets.

The S-1701 legislation passed in 2004 has been very effective in bringing about a soft landing in the shrinking and eventual elimination of hoarded excess unreserved surplus over a 2 percent retained reserve. The just passed A-1 legislation placed a 4 percent cap on the second component of the net spending budget, the general fund tax levy the schools can extract from the taxpayers each year. The third component, the core curriculum aid (formula state aid), has been under state control all along.

Conversations with admin-istrators raise the hope that in the next two to three years, the school districts will be faced with the need to cut some of the "valuable programs" to pay for meeting 100 percent of the mandated core curriculum implementation.

Alternatively, the school boards will be able to present the voters with separate questions on the ballot asking for funding of the "valuable programs." They will have to tell the voters what funding is necessary to meet basic educational obligations to provide the sound thorough and efficient education defined by law (the core curriculum).

They will also have to inform the voters in clearly defined separate ballot question(s) of the exact cost of feeding the district's pet snakes ("valuable programs"). This is the only way to bring the desired transparency and much needed accountability (and credibility) to the school budget process.

Our local legislators (Town-ship Council) must be reminded again and again that we do not have to wait on the largesse of the state Legislature to get property tax relief. Council can give it to us now by the simple, responsible act of stabilizing (keeping flat) the skyrocketing school tax rate. If the effort to get additional state aid funding shifted from the Abbott districts to suburban districts is successful, fine, just make sure it goes to additional school tax relief (reduction), not increased spending on pet snakes, but do not hold your breath.

Nicolas Antonoff

Jackson