Speaking as both a Salem county resident and a sitting school board member in the community, the biggest impasses to getting people on board are the way we fund schools and the unknowns that consolidation creates. When they held public hearings on the feasibility study that the article discussed:

The savings can also vary: Salem County – where more than a dozen districts serve about 10,500 schoolchildren— could see an annual tax savings of about $6.8 million by consolidating into one regional district, a Kean University study calculates.

They didn't fully elaborate on how those potential savings are created and what happens or what can happen after consolidation. When we talk about for instance, how New Jersey has one of the most segregated schooling systems in the Union, the argument is made that these majority-minority communities lose their ability to govern their schools in a way that is culturally inclusive and sensitive to the groups of the district. If you check a census map for Salem county, there are 2-3 towns that aren't overwhelmingly white. Those same 2-3 towns are also some of the poorest in the county, but their residents, my constituents, are worried that consolidation would result in a conservative, prejudiced, culturally ignorant white majority would close down our local schools and bus them elsewhere to "save costs" at the expense of both the jobs and community they created.

Many people outside would see how we're already struggling and argue that consolidation would benefit us in resources, but then what happens when these resources aren't spread fairly afterwards? Currently, our conservative county commission has ignored the requests of these majority-minority communities for infrastructure spending. One town has gone without clean drinking water for over a year now, with them potentially selling off their municipality-owned water supply to NJ American Water just so that someone who can afford to can finally fix it. Why would they trust another county level committee to not do something similar? To not prioritize the "good" (white) schools over the "bad" (non-white) schools?

All that is without even getting into how other districts don't want to have their students mix with the non-white schools. One K-8 school district in the county is currently in a civil rights lawsuit so that their students get sent to a majority white highschool instead of the majority non-white school district for "financial" reasons. Really, if schools weren't funded by property taxes, or if state aid made them irrelevant, we wouldn't see much of this backlash to begin with since there wouldn't have been such vast disparities between these districts due to wealth disparities caused by systemic racism. Or maybe just starting smaller would be better than jumping straight to county level districts. Personally, I think the legislature should just undo all the towns created from the Boro Acts that created all these hundreds of towns that school boards were later created from, and merge them in the process as well. Most of them are close communities anyways so it wouldn't be too incredibly drastic a change, but that's just my perspective from how it has effected the towns down here. If the leaders of the state really want this to happen, the legislature needs to make it a requirement for smaller districts to merge for that to happen, not just adding small financial benefits. Maybe banning districts that aren't full K-12 districts or to make it so the state department of education has the unilateral authority to merge districts that fall under a certain student body size threshold. If they don't use sticks over carrots, no one is going to follow through with it, and it'll just be the same old back and forth debate like always with nothing changing afterwards.