Ongoing NYC Education Budget Cuts Call Into Question Efficacy of Current Funding System
On the evening of October 13th, a forum of mostly parent advocates gathered to strategize against the recent NYC education budget cuts by Mayor Eric Adams’ administration.
The parents shared their concerns about how these cuts would affect their children, from losing important programs, to schools not meeting the requirements for accommodating disabilities. “We have to share textbooks, even in fours sometimes. In the bathrooms, only one of the sinks works,” said one of the only students present at the forum, Kalia Jackson.
After the Department of Education cuts this year, parents began to organize around restoring the money. But the fight over funding has as much to do with the formula for determining funding, as the cuts themselves.
The total Fiscal Year 2023 education budget is $38 billion, according to the Department of Education website. The Comptroller’s office has found this year’s Fair Student Funding cuts to amount to $469 million dollars less than the FY22 budget.
“Fair Student Funding is based on the number of students enrolled at each school and the needs of those students”, according to the DOE site.
The mayor’s office cites low enrollment with relation to the FSF formula as justification for the budget cuts. The DOE projects an enrollment loss of almost 100,000 students throughout NYC from 2020 to 2023.
The mayor’s plan to address the issue of low enrollment itself has not been clearly or widely communicated.
The attorney leading an ongoing lawsuit in the hopes of getting the cuts reversed, Laura Barbieri, said that FSF does not properly account for the needs of students, “a system which is based on attendance or enrollment, I believe is fundamentally flawed.”
United Federation of Teachers official Bill Woodruff echoes this sentiment, saying, “the funding system is broken.” He references a cartoon to serve as an analogy for the importance of equity over equality in the funding system, “You have three kids all standing on a box staring over a fence, right? They all receive the same box. But that short kid still can’t see the baseball game on the other side of the fence. And the tall kid, you know, his knees are over the fence. So how do we level the playing field?”
Schools, which started on September 8th, are struggling to maintain their usual systems. Woodruff said schools are “scrambling to close classrooms and remove services, when they might have already started in the school building.” “So parents have started to build these relationships, and think about what the school year is going to be like for their kid, and now we’re pulling the rug out from under them. Now. it just doesn’t make any sense. It isn’t right,” he said.
Barbieri described a plaintiff of hers who had been impacted by the cuts. He was a music teacher whose position at one school was terminated, and had found a job in the music department of another school. “That is not such a terrible thing, except for the fact that in his home school, he had been there for 10 years,” Barbieri said.
“I had an opportunity to see the direct impact that [the cuts] would have on my son’s school, which is a relatively small school,” said Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, a Panel for Educational Policy member on the NYC Board of Education and PhD lecturer, who also works with Alliance for Quality Education. She is also a mother of two biracial children who attend public schools, one of whom requires an Individualized Education Program (IEP).
“I think that with the budget cuts, it exacerbates the desire of people to leave the system, because they’re like, “I’m just going to go somewhere else where I’m providing my child with resources, or, you know, a charter school that may seem more resourced than our public schools,”” said Salas-Ramirez.
“The city should be asking what is the need? How much does that cost? Okay, now let’s fund it,” said AQE’s Campaign Co-ordinator Smitha Varghese. “What we’re saying is you need to go by the need first. It’s not about moving pieces of the pie, it’s about making the pie bigger.”
To be sure, the money must be spent wisely; Varghese notes that principals are not financial experts, and don’t know how to utilize the money to its fullest extent, so decisions need to be a collaboration between parents, educators, and students. “What we don’t want is for a school to get a lot of money, and to not use that money effectively, and we still see students leaving and low graduation rates. And then you have people at the top saying, ‘See, even if you give these kids money, they’re still failing’, right? So it’s increased funding, and on top of that, when we increase our money, we need to make sure that there’s a layered and democratic approach to how this money is being spent.”
When the sources were asked whose support they thought was crucial to helping this issue, the answer was a resounding, “Parents.”, by both the AQE and UFT representatives. “Parents are the most important part of their child’s life. If parents stand up and say, we demand more from the DOE, we are demanding that our children have arts and sports and access, the DOE will listen,” said Woodruff. Varghese mirrors this, “No one’s going to be a better advocate for students than their parents. So definitely, definitely parents.”
This was my final news story for a sophomore year university journalism class called ‘News, Narrative, and Design 1’!
