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Elected officials, teachers, and parents offered up a litany of concerns about the DOE’s proposed Contracts for Excellence — regarding both their content and the process by which they were developed — last night at the final public hearing in Manhattan.

The hearing, chaired by Terence Tolbert, executive director of the DOE’s Department of Intergovernmental Affairs (and soon to direct Obama’s Nevada campaign), was well-attended by representatives from numerous organizations, including ACORN, Class Size Matters, the Coalition for Educational Justice, the Alliance for Quality Education, the City Council, school level PTAs, the UFT, and others.

Legally, Contracts for Excellence funding must “supplement, not supplant” existing spending; several speakers expressed concerns that the money will be spent to close holes in the budget rather than create or expand programs. Others worried that the new funding would be used to make up losses due to budget cuts in low-performing schools, rather than expanding services for high-needs children in those schools. Complicating these issues, several speakers noted, the plan includes little oversight of whether principals spend the Contracts for Excellence money as intended.

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Looks like the City Council made good on its promise not to approve a budget that includes cuts to schools — late last night, the council and the mayor tentatively agreed on a budget that includes $129 million the council is allocating to schools to make up for the DOE’s planned cuts.

Centrally, the DOE will accept a small budget cut, as will most other city agencies. Unfortunately for other New Yorkers, restoring school budgets forced the council to cut some of the other services it funds, including senior centers and workforce and youth development programs. And Mayor Bloomberg also warns that if the city’s economic picture continues to deteriorate, city agencies — presumably, including schools — could see their budgets reduced downward during the year. When that happened this spring, schools were forced to cut programs and services midyear, which can be more disruptive than planning ahead for lean times.

Earlier this month, as it became apparent that the DOE had pretty seriously botched the pre-kindergarten admission process, Eduwonkette offered up a multiple-choice question to describe the DOE’s damage-control options. Should the DOE issue a heartfelt apology and plan for improvement; deny that the problem exist; or minimize the significance of the uncertainty for the many families affected? At the time, the DOE was doing everything except apologizing.

Now, it looks like the DOE came up with a fourth option: gloss over the problem as long as possible, release no information about how or whether it’s being cleared up, and then try to avoid a similar problem with gifted and talented admissions decisions by hand-delivering letters over the weekend at the cost of $5 a pop. The DOE says using a courier service was much cheaper than overnighting all of the letters. But completing the process accurately and according to the original schedule would have been even less costly, at a time when the schools are facing 1.4-6 percent budget cuts.