Christie makes appearance outside Trenton with campaign over

Making his first public appearance outside the New Jersey statehouse since ending his presidential campaign, Gov. Chris Christie spoke Wednesday to a group of schoolchildren and teachers at a ribbon-cutting for a Newark school then left by a back door before the ceremony ended.

Christie praised the Schools Development Authority, the successor to the much-criticized Schools Development Corporation, for completing the school a semester early and on budget.

The ceremony marked the official re-opening of Elliott Street Elementary School, which was struck by lightning and condemned after a fire in July 2006. Construction began on the new school in 2014. The 138,000 square-foot school has room for 850 students in pre-kindergarten through eighth grade.

Overall, the governor said, the state has dedicated about $425 million in school projects in Newark, whose schools have been under state control for decades. And he vowed to continue the state's efforts in Newark but took a few swipes at the city.

"I will not be content to continue to listen to the status quo in the Newark public school system because that status quo has consistently failed the families of this city," he said. "Whether it's new buildings or new approaches, we're going to take all of them and we're going to continue to do that until the last day I serve as governor."

Wednesday's event was Christie's first public appearance since he delivered his fiscal 2017 budget address to the Legislature on Feb. 16. Since then, the Republican governor and former presidential candidate has kept a low profile in the state.

It's a sharp contrast compared with last year after his budget address, which included sweeping suggestions to change the debt-laden public pension system, when Christie embarked on town halls in New Jersey.

Ultimately, the Democrat-led Legislature rejected those changes and Christie went from battling with Trenton lawmakers to hitting the campaign trail in July. He spent most of 2015 out of the state.

Now that he's back, Christie is pushing a $34.8 billion budget proposal with only modest changes compared to the 2016 spending plan. Those changes include a roughly $1.9 billion pension payment, accepted by Democrats, as well as a nearly $800 million surplus.

Christie's budget proposal doesn't include a plan to fix the state's fund for road and bridge repairs, but the governor invited Democrats to work with him on the issue and called for a solution grounded in tax fairness, meaning residents' net tax bill to the state shouldn't go up.

Democrats indicate they'll accept a cut in either retirement income taxes or the estate tax in return for hiking the gas tax. Christie has not explicitly said he would agree to raising the 14.5-cent tax, however.

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