We continue our look all this week at top issues facing teachers, parents and students during the first week back at school.

Tonight, teacher shortages.

With tightening budgets and state aid slashed to many districts across the state, some schools have been left with dire options.

Either cut staff or raise property taxes to keep teachers in already packed classrooms.

>> The school district is looking at the everyday impact these shortages are having on students and their schools.

>> It's back to school for students and a fresh start for families.

But for several school districts in New Jersey, the start of the year has been a grueling process trying to balance budgets.

Districts like Jackson.

>> We had an $11 million shortfall in our budget that needed to be filled.

And so what we have done is closed the school, restructured And so what we have done is closed to school, restructured our district, and we are currently selling a school.

-Jackson Superintendent Nicole Porcelli says they've already had to close an elementary school last year.

They had a committee considering a larger restructure but only really got started when they got their state funding numbers in the last budget cycle.

That meant lots of work in a short time.

-We closed a middle school, and now we have restructured, where we have one high school of about 2,300 students.

It's a large high school.

And now we have one middle school with about 1,050 students.

And then we also restructured and pulled our fifth grade out of our elementary buildings and put them into a 5-6 building.

-With all of these changes, were you able to retain staff, or does this also come with staff cuts, teacher cuts?

-We reduced a little over 100 positions in this current budget.

Overall, over the seven years, we've lost 350 positions.

So as you can imagine, we feel that.

We have a lot of people doing a lot more work, but we have not had to lose any programs this year.

Camden Public Schools are dealing with a 91 million dollar deficit this year that led outgoing Superintendent Katrina McCombs to cut more than a hundred staff positions, explains Ransha Dickerson, executive director of the Camden Parents and Students Union.

- She just finished her time as a superintendent by laying off over 117 staff.

Now in that staff, my Lord, she laid off all the supports that we have inside the school.

So climate and culture people, family operations coordinators, attendance officers, certain security officers, they're all gone.

Her remedy to building back that deficit was to lay off those teachers, merge schools into different buildings, and then cut, reduce staff in other buildings.

So it turned the district upside down.

Dickerson says the one Camden enrollment program has pushed kids away from traditional public schools toward Renaissance schools, leading to state funding declines.

But Camden schools are under state control, and she blames the state for not addressing the shortfall earlier.

We should never be in a situation where we're looking at a budget deficit if the state was here monitoring how the money was being spent.

So this seems like it's manufactured misery to a community that's suffering right now with losing its entire support staff across the district.

But it's not all bad news.

In fact, some districts that have faced year-over-year budget shortfalls are finally feeling right-sized.

For the first time, we're feeling very positive that we can focus on kids and programs and supports.

Even though it's bare bones, I feel like I'm not filling in a hole anymore.

Even though they got there on the backs of their taxpayers.

We ultimately ended up with an 18% tax levy increase.

And I think we're talking about any tax increase.

It makes for difficult conversations in the community.

- In Plainfield, that 18% increase fell short of the 36% they needed to fill their budget hole.

The nearly 20% gap meant Superintendent Rashaan Hassan had to make some hard choices this year.

Fortunately, it did not result in any reductions of staff, but what it did mean is that some facility projects that we intended to execute in the 25-26 school year had to be deferred.

Over two years, residents in Toms River have seen a 22% total tax increase.

Which is close to $35 million to our taxpayers in two years.

You know, that's a lot of money.

We have not had to lay off, but we've had to scale back through attrition.

So in order to balance these budget and keep the impact as low as possible, I'm working a million and a half dollars less in salaries just in the administration and business office.

- Both Plainfield and Toms River feel the pressure now of proving a return on those tax increase investments, which they're committed to doing.

And each of these districts says the funding formula needs to be fixed and fast so districts can get back to focusing on educating their kids.

For NJ Spotlight News, I'm Joanna Gagis.