TOMS RIVER — Ocean County is defying Gov. Phil Murphy and will cooperate with federal immigration authorities, while at the same time demanding the state pay millions more to cover the cost of increased enrollment of undocumented students in local school districts.
The all-Republican board — which has sparred with the governor on immigration enforcement in the past — adopted a resolution Wednesday that calls on the Murphy administration and state Legislature to revise its school funding formula to “provide full funding for the cost to educate multilingual learner students attending our schools.”
Commissioner Jennifier Bacchione, a former president of the Berkeley Board of Education, said that Murphy had made New Jersey “a sanctuary state” and that his administration had a fiduciary responsibility to compensate those communities negatively impacted by such policies.
New Ocean County Board of Commissioners member Jennifier Bacchione is shown during her first meeting Monday, January 6, 2025, in Toms River. Bacchione is the former Berkeley Board of Education President.
“One district within our 33 municipalities has the issue of educating the multilingual learners, who are mostly coming from the undocumented,” Bacchione said.
After the meeting, Bacchione said the district in question is the Toms River Regional School District, which was operating with a $12.4 million budget deficit as of last month.
Mike Kenny, a spokesman for Toms River Regional Schools, said there are 945 multilingual learners in the district. There are about 14,500 students in the district.
The district did not provide what percentage of the 945 students were undocumented.
Bacchione said the multilingual learners require special assistance to educate at a total cost of more than $23.5 million as of Oct. 9. The cost per pupil to educate a multilingual learner in the Toms River district was $25,000, Bacchione and Kenny said.
The commissioner emphasized that the resolution was not intended to stigmatize or remove those children from the student rolls, only to recognize the financial hardship that the Murphy administration has imposed on the taxpayers of Ocean County.
“Not that we do not want to teach, we want to teach and educate our children,” she said. “However, the state should provide the funding.”
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In order to educate those students, the district needed 21 teachers, one English as a Second Language coordinator and one English as a Second Language coach, with the cost of each specialized faculty member about $75,000, she said.
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“This is putting more of a burden to the taxpayers,” Bacchione said. “On that resolution, we are asking Gov. Murphy to fund what he has provided for in the sanctuary state.”
In a statement to the Asbury Park Press on Thursday, Kenny said the multilingual learners require “many additional supports.”
“Given the additional costs districts incur, the state should consider a separate category of school aid for MLs, like they have for special needs children,” Kenny said.
A spokesperson for the governor did not immediately comment.
After the meeting, county commission Director Jack Kelly, an ardent supporter of President Donald Trump, said that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel were welcome to visit the Ocean County Jail to cross-reference inmate information with their own databases.
Ocean County Commissioner Jack Kelly, co-liaison to the Finance Department, pictured behind the board’s dais at the county Administration Building in Toms River in 2023.
“I want to cooperate with ICE,” Kelly said. “It’s always been my directive and it still is.”
When asked if the county government was in compliance with the Murphy administration’s “Immigrant Trust Directive,” which since 2018 has limited the types of assistance New Jersey law enforcement officers may provide to federal immigration authorities, Kelly was defiant.
“Who knows?” he replied. “But we’re doing it anyway.”
After the directive went into force, the Board of Commissioners in 2019 unsuccessfully sued the administration over the rights of county law enforcement agencies to cooperate with the federal government on immigration enforcement in Ocean County.
Contact Asbury Park Press reporter Erik Larsen at elarsen@gannettnj.com.
This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Ocean County NJ ready to work with feds on immigration enforcement
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