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Bloomberg discusses school funding during today's budget briefing

The education proposals that Mayor Bloomberg announced during his State of the City speech last week made no appearance at his budget briefing today.

Nor did the policy he had pushed last year during the budget process, an end to seniority-based layoff rules.

In fact, in his budget proposal for the fiscal year that begins in July, Bloomberg said little about schools except that the Department of Education is among the only city agencies not set to experience budget cuts. The city is planning to spend $13.6 billion on schools in 2012-2013, and layoffs are not on the table.

That’s good news for principals, who said last year (as they had in the past) that they could not fathom cutting anything more in their schools.

But the budget proposal counts on some revenue that is not at all assured — increased school aid from the state.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, of course, has said the aid increase would go only to districts that have new teacher evaluations in place. So far, the city and teachers union have been unable to agree on new evaluations and do not appear on the brink of doing so.

But Bloomberg said today he was not worried about Cuomo’s threat, arguing that the aid increases were slated well before Cuomo’s recent ultimatum. (more…)

Chancellor Dennis Walcott and P.S. 130 Principal Lily Woo look on as one kindergarten teacher and her student read from a class assignment.

Even at an elementary school with high scores, experienced teachers, and years of A’s on the city’s progress reports, budget cuts are taking a toll.

At Chinatown’s P.S. 130, average class size has ballooned from between 25 and 28 students per classroom last year to 32, the maximum allowed.

Because the school lost about $1 million from its budget in the last two years, it had to cut teaching positions and reading teachers, according to longtime Principal Lily Woo.

As Chancellor Dennis Walcott looked on today, second-grade teacher Danielle Cannistraci gathered her 31 students on the rug around the front of the classroom in a circle two rows deep for a lesson about shapes.

When she asked the students to name a three-dimensional shape with no round edges, half a dozen hands shot in the air with the answer (in this case, a pyramid).

Cannistraci, who has worked at P.S. 130 for 11 years, said the lesson exemplified her efforts to make her teaching more engaging. But with 31 students this year, up from 27, she said she is struggling to give each student individual attention and manage the time students spend doing group work.

“I’ve always put them in groups, but now I have a whole extra group — it’s become much harder,” she said. “Normally I have five groups for reading, writing, and math. But if I have six guided-reading groups I can’t focus on one in each day anymore because that means one group isn’t going to be seen at all.” (more…)

The city’s budget watchdog predicted less money making its way to classrooms next year, even as it said the city’s overall economic outlook could be rosier than what Mayor Bloomberg has previously suggested.

The Independent Budget Office yesterday said that rising costs for contracts, employee benefits, and charter school payments appear poised to cut into the funds that the Department of Education is free to allocate to schools. The IBO analyzed this year’s budget and Mayor Bloomberg’s November financial plan and determined that spending for classroom instruction and school administration could drop by $300 million in 2013, a 3.3 percent decrease.

That’s because funds would likely have to be redirected to other areas of the DOE where costs are soaring, according to the report: pre-kindergarten special education contracts with private schools are set to increase by 10 percent, to $100 million; fringe benefits for school employees are expected to increase 2.5 percent, to $68 million; and payments to charter schools, which are enrolling more students each year, will go up 5.6 percent to $46 million.

City officials disputed the IBO’s projections of next year’s spending as premature.

“It’s impossible to say what we’re spending next year because we haven’t put out a budget, for schools or any other agency yet,” said City Hall spokesman Marc LaVorgna. A preliminary budget for the 2013 fiscal year is expected in January or February. (more…)

Principals allocated slightly more funding to the arts last year, according to a new report from the Department of Education. But arts spending is still much lower than it was before citywide budget cuts two years ago.

The total school-based spending on arts last year was $316 million, up from $312 million in the 2009-2010 school year but down from $326 in 2008-2009. The tally is contained in the city’s 2010-2011 Arts in Schools Report, an annual collection of facts and figures that the DOE released today.

“This year’s report shows that thanks to the hard work and resourcefulness of our schools and cultural partners, we continue to make steady progress in offering arts instruction to more students,” Chancellor Dennis Walcott said in a statement.

Other notable data points:

• Fifty-four percent of elementary schools provided instruction to all grades in four arts disciplines — theater, music, visual arts, and dance — up from 51 percent in 2010 and just 40 percent in 2009. (more…)

It’s not the millionaire’s tax that some parents have pushed for, but it’s something.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced today that he would overhaul the state’s tax code to reduce the tax rate on middle-income earners and increase taxes on the highest earners. Cuomo estimates that the changes will add $2 billion a year to the state’s coffers — funds that can go to schools and other public services.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew was among the chorus of people who quickly signaled their support for the proposal. He called the plan “a wide-ranging solution to the state’s budget problems” and said it would “help ensure that children in our public schools will begin to see restorations from the devastating education cuts of recent years.”

But a separate tax on high earners known as the millionaire’s tax, which Cuomo has vowed not to renew when it expires at the end of the month, has generated significantly more, about $4 billion a year. That means the state is still facing a funding shortfall of as much as $1.5 billion, and schools are likely to feel continued budget pressure. (more…)

A screenshot of GrayMatter's website.

As a student at Staten Island Technical High School, Jeremy Meyers couldn’t always get the gear he needed as a member of the fencing team. The Model United Nations team he had helped start was scrambling for funds to attend conferences. And he saw that computer programming classes were cut alongside the school’s budget.

Instead of making do with less, Meyers, now a freshman at Columbia University, teamed up with classmates to develop a strategy to fill the budget gaps.

The result is GrayMatter, a foundation that aims to make it easier for students to raise money for their schools.

Modeled off of DonorsChoose, the website that many teachers use to solicit donations for school supplies, GrayMatter allows students in city schools to list projects in need of support, then collects and disburses funds on the students’ behalf after verifying with school officials that the need is real.

Right now, Jim, a senior at a Brooklyn school, still needs $282.72 to allow two members of a community service group to attend a leadership conference. The final bill comes to $612.72, and 17 people have already pitched in $330. (more…)

A screenshot from the Facebook event advertising a rally to support Juan Morel Campos Secondary School

Community meetings at schools that the Department of Education is considering closing have started attracting a new constituency: students.

That’s because the meetings, which the DOE calls “early engagement conversations,” are now being held at high schools. Until this week, all of the meetings had happened at elementary and middle schools, for which the city released a shortlist of potential closures in September.

One meeting took place Monday evening at Wadleigh Secondary School for Performing Arts, where some members of the school community are arguing that its progress report data aren’t bad enough to warrant closure. Last night, students made the case for keeping Manhattan’s High School of Graphic Communications Arts open. And today, students have recruited crowds to defend Juan Morel Campos Secondary School in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Tiffany Munoz, a Juan Morel Campos junior who was student body president last year, said students were alarmed when they heard that the school could close and quickly invited hundreds of current and former students to a Facebook event, “Save Juan Morel Campos Secondary School (I.S. 71) From Being Closed.” Tonight, when the school’s superintendent meets with community members, 150 students who RSVPed yes plan to let her know that the school is a tight-knit community with a thriving arts and music program where teachers push students to do their very best. (more…)

Chart showing trends in K-3 class size. From Class Size Matters PowerPoint presentation. (Click to enlarge.)

Preliminary class size data that the city released today confirms what the teachers union has tallied: Class sizes are on the rise.

Classes grew most this year in kindergarten through third grade, where the average size increased by just under one student since last year to 23.1. On average, classes in those grades are now three students larger than they were in the 2006-2007 school year. They are largest in Queens and Staten Island and smallest in Manhattan.

Classes in those grades are now the largest they have been since 1998, according to a PowerPoint presentation prepared by parent activist Leonie Haimson for Class Size Matters, a group that she runs to advocate for smaller classes.

Class sizes have also inched up in upper elementary, middle, and high school grades, but not by as much, according to the city’s new numbers.

In all grades, average class sizes exceed the goals set forth in the 2007 Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit settlement, which required the state to earmark extra funds for New York City schools to use for six different purposes, including reducing class size. (more…)

Annual state spending on school aid will be down 6.1 percent this year, according to new spending projections from Governor Andrew Cuomo’s budget office.

The new projections show the state’s budget gap growing from $2 billion to up to $3.5 billion. The reductions come after three straight years of budget cuts that have left schools struggling.

Last week parent activists took their message to Cuomo’s office, urging him not to repeal the so-called “millionaire’s-tax” on high-earning residents and the decry the effects of the current state budget on class size in local schools.

Last year, New York City lost $812 million in state education funding. According to the revised plan, the state will spend about $19.6 billion on school aid this year—a reduction of nearly $1.3 billion from the 2011 budget.

Earlier this fall educators and families in New York City and elsewhere rallied against the $1.3 billion already slashed from the state’s education funds, many of them lamenting that beloved after school programs were the first expenses to go at their local schools.

Union officials presented findings from a survey outside P.S. 1 in Chinatown today.

Years of budget cuts have slashed academic programs, increased class sizes, and shortchanged teachers of classroom supplies, according to results of a survey conducted by the United Federation of Teachers.

The cuts hit after-school programs and elementary class sizes particularly hard, according to the survey’s findings, which were compiled from anecdotal accounts from UFT chapter leaders at more than half of the city’s roughly 1,700 schools.

The city’s budget environment has been grim since the start of the economic recession in 2008. As the city’s costliest agency, the Department of Education – and especially its individual school budgets – has shouldered a hefty burden of the cuts. This year, Chancellor Dennis Walcott cut school budgets by an average of 2.4 percent, or $178 million. That followed 4 percent cuts in 2010.

The survey confirms what the UFT had already known – and what the DOE had already had acknowledged – about class sizes: They are up. In September, a UFT study reported that 7,000 classes citywide were too crowded.

Three out of four elementary schools reported that class sizes were on the rise, with some classes increasing by more than 10 students, according to one anecdote. (more…)