New Jersey schools are getting only a portion of the money they sought to implement the state’s Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights.

The state allocated a million dollars to help school districts pay for personnel and training after the Council on Local Mandates ruled in January that New Jersey’s anti-bullying law is an unconstitutional unfunded mandate on school districts.

New Jersey School Boards Association spokesman Frank Belluscio says districts are getting far less than the $5 million in grants they wanted.

 “You do have a case of an unfunded requirement in local school districts. We are going to have to see where we go further on this, but at this point it does show the amount of money provided was not adequate to implement this bill.”

Rather than selecting individual districts to get the money, the state decided to give each of those requesting the grants about 20 percent of their eligible expenses.
That amounts to thousands of dollars for some of them, while half received less than 12-hundred dollars.