Jersey City Public Schools 26-27 Budget, Explained High Level (A Short Video Series)

I'm trying something new on Civic Parent - video tutorials with accompanying interactive Tableau visualizations.

I've been told my in-person and on-screen explanations are helpful - I do this with clients, in my volunteer work, and I've done it in public spaces with organizations like Jersey City Together. So what I'm trying to do here is model that approach through Civic Parent. I've circled this idea for years and finally decided to do it.

I have a welcome video to share some important caveats and disclaimers. Please watch for context and nuance that surround my explainers and follow-on videos.

I'm grateful to Tableau which offers its public publishing platform for this type of free, nonprofit access to data visualizations and insights.

When I first became interested in Jersey City's local government (20 years ago) I had no idea where to find the budget. I had to ask my local councilman and was sent thick stacks of printed budgets in a manilla envelope. I had no idea how to make sense of them.

I don't forget those earliest days which is why I alway start with the basics: how do you get to the public data. Public data sourced from a local government (e.g. from its website) is the canonical starting point. Everyone should feel welcome, engaged, and able to start from there. If the data is hard to access or not available, then you may need to call your local clerk or email the business administrator to ask that it be posted. Budgets are required to be posted in a timely manner per NJ state law (check out NJ's Division of Local Government LFN 2026-05 here for context and further reference).

Links referenced in the video (also available via video comments): JC BOE's School Funding and District Budget page.

The video is an onscreen explainer of what I'm observing, and it also helps illustrate how you can use the dashboard (below the video) to dig into the budget yourself. The link to the budget file is provided below the visual.

I like to start with Expense because it points to: what is this system about? What are we funding? Why is it important? These are essential baseline questions that start to peel back the layers on the surface dollar numbers.

How we pay for it all is where the school tax comes into play. Taxpayers are critical stakeholders and they deserve transparency into the investment (via expenses) and how much is being asked of them (via revenues) and why the tax is going up (trade-offs among revenue "buckets").