The New Jersey Department of Education is forcing the Jackson School District to sell a 60-year-old elementary school amid more cuts.

The final decision came a month after it first seemed inevitable.

“It was a full week before we heard anything, which really held us back for planning purposes,” said Superintendent Nicole Pormilli. “It was a surprise how long it took.”

The only way out of an $18 million budget deficit involved closing the Sylvia Rosenauer Elementary School and reducing staff by 70 -- a plan the local board of education opposed.

Although a last-minute $2.5 million in state aid will save the courtesy busing program, the cuts will be felt elsewhere.

“We're able to still keep most of our athletic programs, but we've reduced by some coaches and assistant coaches,” Pormilli said. “We are just so thinly-staffed - our operations of our facilities, our teachers, all of our support staff - very thin and everybody is very overworked.”

The budget also includes a 9.9% tax levy increase approved by the state after years of a static cap. The township’s board of education rejected the tax hike, which state monitors overruled.

“We've been asking for that 2% cap to be lifted a little bit, but not 9.9%,” Pormilli said. “That's a lot all in one shot.”

Pormilli is budgeting $7 million from the Rosenauer School’s eventual sale.

“The selling of the school, that's a one-and-done money,” Pormilli said. “It's not constant revenue, so it doesn't solve our problem.”

The K through 5 students and teachers that made up the Rosenauer School, will be moving two miles up the road over to the Crawford-Rodriguez Elementary School.

Rosenauer’s pre-K classes will be split between Crawford, the Johnson Elementary School and a wing of Jackson Memorial High School.

The board says these changes aren’t from overspending, but a near-decade of cuts from the Gov. Phil Murphy’s “S2” funding formula without another revenue source.

The formula reallocates money to underfunded districts based on “local fair share” calculations.

“I don’t think S2 is completely broken,” Pormilli said. “But I do think that there are things that need to be tweaked there, that perhaps they didn't anticipate.”

Jackson is far from the only district facing these issues.

Toms River, Howell and Freehold Regional districts are also facing tax levy increases and staff cuts that they blame on S2.

Murphy has previously said on News12’s “Ask The Governor” that the formula may be reevaluated.