Dear New Yorkers,
Like many of you, I’ve been attending school graduations over this past week. Our schools have worked amazingly hard to support their students through the social, emotional and academic challenges of these pandemic years. As the school year comes to a close today, I am deeply moved by the resilience of our students and the dedication of our educators through a very difficult time.
At each graduation, I’ve asked principals about the cuts to their FY 23 budgets that the DOE is making, and what they are planning to do.
The answers are devastating.
A middle-school principal who is losing three teachers told me that she had to let go the last of five art teachers that her middle schoolers have lost in recent years. Another told me that the teachers she is losing will mean the loss of a new lab program for young learners that has been attracting new enrollment.
On Friday afternoon, I testified before the City Council’s Education and Oversight and Investigations Committees on key questions regarding school budgets:
- What is being cut from school budgets?
- What is the status of the remaining federal stimulus funding?
- How should we think about budgeting for the long-term, including re-enrollment decline and end of stimulus funding?
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Our analysis of individual school budgets made available by the DOE this month shows a net reduction of $372 million from Fair Student Funding (FSF), one of the formulas that guides budget allocations for our schools. 1,166 schools will see an average FSF cut of $402,456-- on average 8% of individual school budgets.
Roughly 450 schools have cuts exceeding 10% of their budgets. Dozens of schools are seeing cuts of over $1 million. This type of dramatic decrease is not something individual schools can absorb in one year without drastically impacting essential services for students.
The federal government provided the Department of Education $7 billion in stimulus funds to be spent over four years to help schools support students through the academic and emotional challenges brought by the pandemic.
Based on available data, the DOE has spent $2.3 billion of that funding and by the end of the fiscal year next week we expect that approximately $4.3 billion in federal stimulus funding will be left to spend over the next three fiscal years.
Our analysis shows about $620 million of stimulus funding that was budgeted but not spent in FY22 will be rolled forward to future years—more than enough to cover the cuts to school budgets for next fall. And it would still leave a total of $3.7 billion remaining to spend over the next three years.
Those funds are already budgeted for important programs, including Summer Rising, 3K expansion, academic recovery, support for students with IEPs, and more. But those are policy choices. The DOE is currently choosing to cut individual school budgets while applying remaining one-time federal funding to those other uses.
It's no secret that the past three school years have been incredibly difficult and our schools are facing an array of overlapping challenges, exacerbated by the pandemic.
As our city emerges from the trauma of the pandemic, our schools desperately need the resources to provide our students with every available tool to help them recover and grow. Over the next year, we can and should address enrollment declines and revisit the Fair Student Funding formula.
But we should not be forcing schools to implement sharp cuts to their budgets this summer. Right now is the time when principals are making critical staffing and programmatic decisions for the fall. Using a modest portion of the unspent federal stimulus funding to keep teachers in the classrooms now is the right thing to do.
At a time when our democracy itself is under attack, I am more convinced than ever that our public schools are the best hope we have to build the multiracial democracy that we strive to be. There’s no doubt that a strong school system is a key to NYC’s long term economic success. Funding and supporting quality public education is essential to a more just and equal future for our young people, for our city, and for our democracy.
Onward,
Brad
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