If you're interested in learning about the great state of New Jersey then you've come to the right place and as we're all about what makes New Jersey such a great place to live in and why it's always talked about. One New Jersey item that a lot of people want to know about is the Opportunity Scholarship Act.
There's been a lot of controversy surrounding the Opportunity Scholarship Act ever since Senate Minority Leader Tom Kean Jr. and Democratic Senator Raymond Lesniak introduced it. If you don't know what the Opportunity Scholarship Act is and are interested in learning more about it then let us tell you.

The Opportunity Scholarship Act is a government program aimed at creating new scholarships that would be awarded to low-income students to use to help them transfer out of under-performing schools they currently attend. Senator Lesniak had this to say after the bill was introduced: "The Opportunity Scholarship Act being introduced today by Senate Minority Leader Tom Kean, Jr. and myself will establish a five-year pilot program to provide scholarships to private or public schools for children from low income families attending chronically failing public schools."

The Opportunity Scholarship Act is considered a pilot corporate tax credit and allows any student who receives it to use it towards any costs associated with transferring from a low-performing or failing public school to attend a public school that's out-of-district or a non-public school of their choosing in New Jersey that's a part of this program.

To be eligible for the Opportunity Scholarship Act a student must come from a low-income family and be attending a public school that is deemed, "chronically failing", which means it's a school that has at least a 40% failure rate of all their students in both math and language arts the last two years or a 65% failure rate the past two years in at least one of those areas. Stats showed that out of 2,580 New Jersey public schools a total of 205 would be considered failures, or, roughly about 8%.

The minimum value of a scholarship is, according to the program, "the audited cost to educate a student at a participating school." The program also states that the maximum scholarship worth is, "the higher of a percentage of the average per-pupil costs in all pilot districts with chronically under-performing schools, or $8,000 for students in grades K-8, and $11,000 for high school students."

The total number of scholarships to be awarded doesn't have a specific number but estimates show that it would range anywhere from 2,500 to 3,800 children in the first year of existence and that number would eventually reach between 12,500 to 19,000 children in the following years.

Hopefully you are now more aware of New Jersey's Opportunity Scholarship Act than you were when you first came to our website and are no longer uneducated about it. Browse the rest of our site to become more informed about anything New Jersey related such as the New York Giants, New Jersey state parks, New Jersey Devils, Atlantic City, the New Jersey real estate market and so much more!