>> From NJ PBS studios, this is NJ Spotlight News with Briana Vannozzi.

>> Hello and thanks for joining us tonight.

>> I'm Joanna Gagis in for Brianna Vannozzi.

A few topics we'll get into later in the broadcast.

The state's facing a $3 billion deficit.

We talk with the republican budget officer who's been warning of this for years.

And an emergency department is set to close in Jersey City, but local leaders say it's a critical service for the community.

And later, is your district using proven methods to teach reading?

Many aren't.

But first, New Jersey is responding after President Trump, together with Israeli leaders, carried out major combat operations in Iran this weekend.

State leaders are putting extra safety precautions in place here at home, especially given our large Jewish and Iranian populations, who are divided in their responses to the attacks.

New Jersey Attorney General Jen Davenport said in a statement, quote, "While there are no specific threats to the safety in New Jersey, law enforcement will increase patrols of sensitive areas, particularly houses of worship, to ensure that everyone feels safe and secure in their communities."

New Jersey's federal lawmakers are also split in their reactions, although one message they all agree on?

Iran is one of the largest state supporters of terror in the world.

But they're torn on whether the president needs approval from Congress to continue military action.

One Democrat, Congressman Josh Gottheimer, an avid supporter of Israel, broke with his party and joined Republicans in praising the attacks.

Although he's calling for an immediate classified briefing to review the scope of military action and the steps being taken to protect American citizens in the region.

Coming up, Republicans are saying, "Told you so," as Governor Sherrill announces a massive structural budget deficit.

We'll get into that next.

Funding for NJ Spotlight News provided by the members of the New Jersey Education Association.

Making public schools great for every child.

Governor Sherrill announced last week the state budget is facing a $3 billion structural deficit.

That means it's on track to spend more than it brings in.

And Sherrill says that unless something changes, the state will burn through its $7 billion surplus in two fiscal years.

It's a new challenge for a new governor as Sherrill prepares to deliver her first budget address next Tuesday.

But it's nothing new for Republicans who've been warning about a structural deficit for years.

Joining us now is the Republican budget officer Senator Declan O'Scanlan to share his thoughts as part of our Under the Dome series.

Senator thanks so much for taking a few minutes to talk to us.

You and I have spoken about this structural deficit for a long time.

What was your reaction hearing the governor come out and announce it last week.

It was a complete vindication of everything I and my fellow Republicans have been saying.

It's sad because it didn't have to be this way.

Had our warnings been heeded years ago we could have been in great shape right now with relatively little little pain actually.

We could have redone the school funding formula saving more than a billion dollars a year.

Given a lot more money to districts that arguably deserve more money just not an obscene amount of money to the point where they're setting it on fire.

It's a shame that those opportunities were squandered because we won't have them again.

We could have done relatively easy relatively painless prospective pension and health benefits reforms.

Had we done those five years ago, six years ago, and Republicans have been calling out for this since the beginning of the Murphy administration, had we done it, again, our budget would be close to balanced right now probably because of the compounded savings that would have accrued over those years.

None of that happened.

And we warned every year our colleagues on the other side of the And as much as this was vindication for Republican budget prescriptions, it was a complete indictment of the Democrats handling of the budget over this past seven, eight years.

Senator, where do we go from here?

Because there's a new administration.

I'm not sure how, if at all, you've communicated with the Sherrill administration about reforms you'd like to see.

But let's just take the first two expenses that are the largest for the state.

You mentioned both the pension fund and, well, you mentioned health benefits.

But let's look at the pension fund first.

Should that be fully funded?

You absolutely have to fully fund.

That's a commitment to the workers.

And again, we did reform back in 2011.

And one of the things we did in exchange for that was promise we'd fully fund.

We ramped up as per that agreement and we have to maintain that funding.

You can't go back to where we're underfunding because it will only compound our problem going forward.

Second, which is also a compounded problem where the bill has come due is the school funding formula.

It's a problem without a clear solution.

And I'm asking you, what would be your plan for how you really restructure the funding formula so that it feels fair?

A lot of districts have said that they've been targeted.

All the politics aside on that, how do you reform that school funding formula?

well had you done it a few years ago it would have been much easier.

you need to look at and there were plenty of districts that were underfunded that legitimately were owed additional money from a moral standpoint and from a previous agreement standpoint.

you could have done that and just... how do you go forward though senator?

how do you reform it from here on out?

you go back into the formula and you claw back what you can from these districts that now are getting way more money than they need and way more money that we can afford.

respectfully, i haven't heard a single district say that they're getting more than they need.

in fact, most districts, even who have been on the gaining side, say that they're still operating on very tight budgets.

well, i can demonstrate, certainly newark.

newark has a million dollar travel budget every year for its board members and staff.

there is no other district in the entire state that has a fraction of that.

there are plenty of districts, a number of districts that are getting more money than they need.

and look, no district is ever going to admit they're getting more than they need.

that's where leadership comes in.

you go in, you dig into their budgets, and you say, look, we can't afford certain things.

We can't afford your million-dollar-a-year travel budget.

We can't afford your hundreds of thousands of dollars in entertainment and balloons.

It's garbage.

And by the way, the kids are still getting a crappy education in Newark and in other places.

So you just have to -- you need executive leadership.

We did not have that with the Murphy administration.

And we haven't had the leadership in the legislature either.

The Democrats around the legislature have been loath to go in and do the real hard work that it's going to take to fix the school funding formula.

Let me ask you this.

It can be done.

You and a number of your colleagues, Senator Testa, Senator Steinhardt, and Amato, put forward a number of reforms that you'd like to see.

I want to just go through a couple of them.

The first is you'd like to eliminate unjustified special grants to counties and schools.

Where would you start there?

Well, I'd start by turning down Jersey City's request to have the state taxpayers come in and bail them out from years of what was Democrat leadership there.

The consequences of poor leadership, of kicking the can down the road, have to fall on the people that voted these people into office.

They should not fall onto the office.

They should not be bailing these people out.

And we have now Newark on the precipice of major budget issues.

The state of New Jersey shouldn't be bailing these places out.

They need to run their budgets and run their operations more efficiently.

It's really that simple.

And the people who voted these people into office are the ones that have to pay the bill.

New Jersey taxpayers, the broad New Jersey taxpayers, send hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars to these places every year.

We can't continue to bail them out for their bad practices.

That's got to end.

Another is you'd like to redirect loans.

And this is really interesting to me.

Right now, the state of New Jersey is making loans to the federal government.

You'd like to see those redirected to municipalities instead.

Can you explain that?

It's where we put our cash on hand, our short term cash on hand.

Right now we invested in we invested in federal treasury issued bonds at very low interest rates that we get back on our own money.

We could invest in municipal bonds.

There hasn't been a municipality in New Jersey that's defaulted in 100 years.

They pay a lot more interest than the feds.

We should be doing that.

It's a little bit more work for Treasury.

Yeah it is.

But it's worth probably hundreds of millions of dollars a year in in extra interest that we would earn on that money is just sitting there in very low yielding federal documents.

We shouldn't do that.

You know we should be investing in municipal bonds.

You'd like to see some reforms made.

You like to see caps on those payments made.

How would the state negotiate that.

Well you got to go back to ideas that came from labor actually that were ignored by the Murphy administration.

Our look our state health benefits plan right now because of a lack of attention by the Murphy administration is likely in a death spiral.

And I don't think anybody has a solution how to fix that.

Regardless of what happens we need to work with labor because they pay a big chunk of their salaries too for these high cost practices.

You need to go in there there's we can negotiate caps on procedures that that line up with federal what the feds pay on prescription drugs.

There are there's a batch of low-hanging fruit that we could hammer out with labor will save our workers money, our New Jersey employed workers money and the taxpayers money at the same time.

Just really quickly because I want to get this in before we run out of time.

There are a number of reforms that have been proposed by both Democrats and Republicans.

A package of bills by Assemblyman Brennan and Assemblywoman excuse me Assemblyman Bala and Assemblywoman Brennan that would require 14 days for the budget to sit before it's approved and then on the Republican side we have Dunn and Scharffenberger proposed a bill that would require any we call them Christmas tree add-ons to be proposed or to be filed by June 1st.

Do you know if there's bipartisan support for the Republican bill?

Are you working with members of the legislature to move both of these packages along?

Are you in support of both?

I'm in support of both.

But look, the legislature already ignores laws that are on the books.

So if you really want to do this and have teeth, we should do a constitutional amendment.

And I would love to have my Democrat friends on the other side of the aisle join us in calling for a constitutional amendment that would mandate a budget process that's clear and transparent.

What we have now is a disaster.

And there's a lot of lip service paid to that disaster from my friends on the other side of the aisle.

But then they don't do anything about it.

I hope they'll join us in proposing a constitutional amendment which would mandate our process.

That's the way to solve it.

We've got to leave it there.

But, Senator Declan O'Scanlan, I appreciate you coming on and talking about this.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me.

Appreciate it.

Under the Dome is made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.

There was outrage late last week when news hit that Heights University Hospital in Jersey City was going to close its emergency department on Saturday night.

Now Heights, formerly known as Christ Hospital, was purchased by Hudson Regional Health last year.

In November, the owners shut down nearly all of the acute care services that Heights Hospital offers.

they had promised to keep the emergency services open so there was outcry from state and local leaders when news broke that HRH owners told the Department of Health they were closing completely.

those leaders then called on the state to intervene and in response HRH agreed late on Friday to keep the emergency department open for two more weeks.

one of those speaking out against the closure is Jersey City Councilman Jake Efros who represents Ward D and he joins us now.

Councilman thank you so much for being with us.

I just have to ask you the HRH says that they are bleeding money that they can't sustain the financial requirements needed to keep this hospital open.

How do you respond to that and to news of this closure?

The bottom line is that we need health care in our community.

They walked into this deal to purchase the hospital to take it over.

And they even last year gave assurances that they would be able to operate this hospital.

And then all of a sudden pulled the plug in November, deviating from compliance with the state.

Short notice closure of the hospital.

And you know now that was reduced to just an emergency room and now we're seeing the same thing happen again where we have last minute notice one day notice that they're going to even close just the vestiges of it just this emergency room.

And because of so much pressure from union leadership from political leadership from the community they are keeping it open for two more weeks which is something but it's still unacceptable and we need a long-term plan here.

So part of their plan is a redevelopment project that would bring housing onto the site.

They say it's needed to generate revenue that they could then turn around and rebuild a new emergency department with.

Are you in support of that plan.

So the plan at first was something along the lines of luxury condos shooting up stories upon stories upon stories on this property.

And it was dubbed senior housing.

That was going to be 55 years of age and up.

So maybe kind of a stretch of this idea of senior housing.

It was going to be luxury development.

And the community was outraged by this.

So Jersey City at the end of the term of the former city council rezoned that land to make sure that it had to stay in acute care facility there.

So again this is clearly the community wants health care here.

We do not want luxury skyrises here.

And we need to make sure that we get our financials in order.

You know not just as a city but as a county as a state.

We get ourselves together to make sure that this hospital can actually work for providing health care and that there is not luxury condos being built up to one day and that we need to have a new hospital there.

I have to ask you, Jersey City is facing a $250+ million budget hole at a time when the city budget is so stretched and there are going to be cuts and the hospital says they simply can't afford to keep it open just the two weeks that it will remain open.

The owner, Jan Mosche, says that it will cost a million dollars.

So what is the financial solution here when we know that it is largely an uninsured and underinsured population that utilizes Heights University Hospital?

Yeah, so first of all I'll say that I'm grateful that Mayor Solomon is in touch with the governor, Governor Sherrill, to make sure that we can have a partnership between the city and the state.

And grateful for our state representatives so that we can work really closely together to get state financing where possible.

That being said, I think we just have to start from the premise of health care as a human right.

That we see demonstrable benefits from public hospitals as opposed to private hospitals in terms of care outcomes, quality care for communities like ours in the Heights.

As you said, underinsured, a lot of folks living in poverty, immigrant communities here using Price Hospital for generations and generations.

And we need to start from the place of healthcare is a human right now.

How do we guarantee that?

I would love to see a plan.

And we have some folks researching this developed between the city, county and the state levels.

We have other county models for publicly run healthcare facilities.

And so I think we can expand on those kinds of models.

And a lot of our tax money here in Jersey City goes to the county level.

So I think this is a place that I'm really interested in exploring how we can work together.

Excuse me at all these different levels of government to eventually make this a publicly run institution.

And you know that's that's my view as city council.

You've been putting that idea forward for even before or right at the beginning of the HRH takeover of Christ Hospital.

Just quickly you mentioned the immigrant community there and you did you were the one who took a video that went viral several weeks ago talking to an ICE officer who said to you while they were about to stage an operation we don't need a warrant bro you got to get that out of your head something to that effect.

What's been the impact of ICE in your community since that that encounter since those arrests happened?

The negative impact is really clear.

There's a lot of fear among our immigrant neighbors.

Just that day we had a lot of businesses closed along Central Avenue out of fear that there would be further raids.

And we have had even more arrests in our community, more kidnappings by ICE in our community since that day on February 1st.

The positive side, if there is one, is that the community has very, very clearly responded to say "ICE out."

We've had massive community meetings with folks getting Know Your Rights trainings and ICE Watch trainings.

We've had massive, massive demonstrations with hundreds and hundreds of people marching through minus 11 degree weather.

We've had young people, high schoolers and others walking out and demonstrating to say ice out.

So we've had an incredible community response that says, you know, Jersey City wants our immigrant community and does not want ice here.

Just really quickly, ICE says and DHS officials say that they're making communities safer by taking folks who are here illegally off the street.

They say there are criminals who they're arresting.

What do you say to that?

We keep us safe.

ICE does not keep us safe.

You know, we know for a fact they have been killing and arresting people with no criminal warrants.

And, you know, this is not even a question for me that this federal agency with masked agents coming around, kidnapping people, is just creating terror and danger and not contributing to safety in any way that we could possibly imagine.

So we keep us safe as a community.

We need to stay close and hold each other close in this moment.

All right.

That's all the time we have, but we thank you for your time today.

Jersey City Councilman and Ward D, Jake Efros, appreciate you being with us.

Thanks so much.

Across the country, states are adjusting how they teach students to read.

That's because for decades, a program was sold to school districts promising to improve outcomes, but in fact, it worsened them.

It relied on pictures and other cues rather than decoding words.

Well, after years of advocacy from education experts, many states, including New Jersey are going back to basics using what's called the science of reading to teach phonics.

But with close to 600 school districts in the state, home rule is making that reform difficult.

Joining us to explain why is our urban education writer, Julie O'Connor.

Julie, so great to have you.

Can you just first explain what is home rule and why it's impacting the reform that the Department of Education has tried to roll out?

Sure.

Home rule is the idea that individual towns and school districts should have the power to manage themselves with minimal interference from the state.

The districts should make their own decisions on things like budget, hiring and curriculum.

So in practice, the state does not force districts to use the specific reading method shown to be more effective.

Instead, it describes the qualities that a good program should have, and then it lets the locals decide in deference to home rule.

>> Yeah, and it's something we've seen play out in a number of areas beyond teaching literacy, teaching reading.

But is there specific guidance from the state in terms of what that ideal model should contain?

>> The state really doesn't -- doesn't have a list of high-quality programs like other states do.

You know, by contrast, republican-controlled states are doing it very differently.

They are mandating that districts choose from an approved list of high-caliber programs.

In New Jersey, it's really left mostly to the locals.

You know, some of them are presumably using really high-quality programs, and others may not be.

And critics say that it's confusing because districts are now being swamped by curriculum vendors, all claiming that their program is science-based.

And this local control, you know, it carries a cost for kids, critics say.

It means that children's literacy will be determined by zip code lottery.

Yeah, there's so much behind that science of reading.

We've covered this issue for a long time.

But the data shows that really students who don't learn phonics and really a phonics based type of reading end up just having much decreased scores and performance levels as they go.

Let me just ask you this.

How many districts in New Jersey have not yet made that change.

Is that information clear.

We don't know.

It's a great question.

And I believe that I've been told that the state board has told districts to make public their programs.

But I'm not sure if that's happening across the board in a standard way.

So I believe that's something that advocates are looking into right now.

We just touched on the science behind the science of reading.

But what does it show?

Your reporting really touched on what it shows in terms of how a child's brain is actually activated when they're learning the right way.

Yes, the science of reading includes a new emphasis on sounding out words.

And it's not just about phonics.

Kids also need the vocabulary and background knowledge to really understand what they're reading.

And a cognitive scientist who I spoke with says that this is showing success not just in higher test scores, but in before and after brain scans that show that when kids learn to decode words, it causes a physical change in their brain that allows them to read more fluidly.

And he called the evidence very compelling.

What can you tell us Julie about the importance of learning to read by the age of third grade?

Third grade is really a critical year because after, you know, kids go from learning to read to reading to learn.

Meaning that they're using their reading skills to acquire knowledge in all different subject areas.

And so kids who can't read in third grade and unfortunately this is a big problem in New Jersey because we've seen as many as 60% of third graders in New Jersey can't read at grade level.

And in some districts it's 90%.

And that's a real concerning marker for experts because that is a critical year where you need to make that transition from learning to read to reading to learn.

In your talking with education experts did you hear any advice any guidance for how districts one can know which criteria which curriculum is actually meeting the criteria and and two really how to get everyone on board with this new idea a lot faster yeah I mean a method that some other states have used is to require local districts to either adopt the proven strategy or show that their own method works just as well and that could earn them a waiver currently you know I spoke to a prominent advocate for reading reform Paula White who describes New Jersey's system today as everyone choosing their own adventure when all options are not created equal so I think that's where we are and I think there's a lot of confusion about which programs are evidence-based and which which aren't and it's very challenging for districts to have to sort that to have to sort that out on their own Yeah, Paula White of course with Jersey Can, they've been a long time advocate for this.

We do have a new commissioner of the Department of Education.

What have you heard from her?

And have you heard her address this issue in particular?

Yes, so Governor Mikie Sherrill's new education chief, Lily Lox, led this reform effort in Texas to get districts more in line with the science.

And while these reforms in other states have not been perfect, the scientist I spoke with says the biggest hurdle is that people will stick with what they know, what he called methods contradicted by a large body of research, and not even face the challenge.

In other words, status quo is good enough?

Yes.

guidance comes in.

Is there any enforcement behind the guidance for districts that aren't making those changes?

Yeah, that's a good question.

I mean, and that is an open question.

What will the Sherrill administration do if certain districts do not choose programs that are considered evidence-based?

Will the Sherrill administration penalize those districts by withholding funding?

That's something that we saw in Texas, which used carrots and sticks to ensure that districts were in line with the latest research.

And I think we don't yet know what the approach will be, but advocates are looking to the Sherrill administration for a sign of how much the state will be involved.

And of course, Lily Lox did come from Texas.

Do you have a sense that she was behind that carrot and stick approach?

She certainly led the effort there, you know, led the effort overseeing many, many districts, getting them in line with the latest science.

And so I know a lot of advocates are hoping that she will bring, you know, more of a forceful approach to New Jersey in order to ensure that children's literacy, you know, isn't determined by zip code lottery.

All right.

Urban education writer Julie O'Connor for us.

Thank you so much.

Thanks Joanna.

And that's going to do it for us.

I'm Joanna Gagis for the entire team here at NJ Spotlight News.

Thanks for being with us.

We'll see you right back here tomorrow.

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