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M.S. 223's budget over time; the lightly shaded area is what he expects to bring in grants this year. (Source: NYC DOE historical Galaxy allocations)

In the last five years, city school budgets have been riding a roller coaster: A historic teacher salary hike was followed by a landmark lawsuit that injected billions in new funds, but then a worldwide financial crisis caused sweeping cuts.

So in the long view, are schools better or worse off than in 2005?

Ramon Gonzalez, principal of the South Bronx’s M.S. 223, has been able to keep his budget steadily higher than it was five years ago. But his modest boon is less than the courts promised in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, and it has as much to do with his own mix of prudent saving and aggressive fundraising as it does with increases in taxpayer support.

“The city budget is not made for you to do incredible things,” Gonzalez said. “You have to figure out how to do the incredible things. That for me is the bottom line.” (more…)

Real cuts to schools could be as high as $750 million, but projections for next year’s school budget are still plagued by uncertainty, and the Department of Education is still figuring out how cuts will affect individual schools.

That was the message of a webinar Chancellor Joel Klein held yesterday for the city’s principals to update them on next year’s dire budget scenario.

Listen to Klein’s webinar with principals:

Klein explained that in addition to the nearly $500 million city officials are projecting will be cut from state school aid, the school system’s uncontrollable costs, like special education and scheduled salary increases, will also rise by $250 million.

But it’s still unclear how those cuts will be spread around to individual schools, Klein said. The chancellor pledged to send schools preliminary budgets by June 1, giving principals at that time the information they will need to plan for next year.

Klein also gave detailed descriptions of two possible methods for deciding how many teachers in each license area will be laid off. “If you think this was written by Kafka, you’re right,” Klein said. (more…)

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Source: NYS Division of the Budget; NYC DOE

The budget plan that the Senate passed yesterday essentially preserves the $1.1 billion in cuts to school aid statewide that Governor David Paterson proposed in January. That would mean a cut of over $400 million to the New York City schools for the next fiscal year, according to the state’s Division of the Budget. And that figure doesn’t even include cuts from the city that are likely to soar above $300 million.

Under the plan, state funding to the city schools would drop to $7.95 billion, below the level of the 2007-2008 school year, when the historic funding increases triggered by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit began. (See the chart above.)

The cuts are even more challenging considering that costs beyond the city’s control like teacher pensions and salaries have skyrocketed in the last several years. (more…)

Buried on the Department of Education’s website is a page that lists per pupil spending on a school-wide, district-wide, and system-wide basis. Using this information, as well as expense data from the 2007-2008 audits and the recent Independent Budget Office report, we compared spending by charter schools and traditional public schools that are located in the same building.

We found that charter schools spent $365 less per pupil than their co-located traditional public schools in 2007-2008. You can see our calculations in a workbook here.

Some notes on our methodology:

• We looked only at the amount the co-located traditional public school spent per pupil on their general education students (which includes part-time but not full-time special education students). This is because while charter schools do enroll special needs students, very few offer all-day special education classes. For reference, we included the numbers for overall per-pupil and full-time special education spending in our database. (more…)
  

In Albany this week, UFT President Michael Mulgrew floated a plan to save the city money by letting teachers retire earlier. But a new report on the health of the city’s teachers pension fund suggests that Mulgrew’s proposal would only compound the fund’s potentially crippling budget crunch.

The fund’s annual report, released last week, shows that it lost 29 percent of its value, more than $9 billion, last school year, even as the portion the city is required to pay reached unprecedented heights.

The mix of rising costs and declining value raises serious questions about how the city will be able to afford to pay the pensions it has promised in the future without major concessions by the teachers union.

The fund, called the Teachers Retirement System (TRS), is a collection of investments paid for with a combination of taxpayer dollars and teacher salaries. Every year a chunk of it is used to pay retired teachers and principals the pensions state law says they are owed.

Last year’s financial crisis sunk the fund to its lowest level in more than 15 years, effectively erasing all of the gains made in the past decade’s bull market, according to a database of TRS’s financial reports. Over that time span, the fund’s value, adjusted for inflation, has shrunk by more than $11 billion.

This leaves a $15 billion gap between what the fund expects to pay out in the next 30 or so years and what it will have saved by that time, according to the TRS’s preferred accounting method. Another way of calculating these “unfunded liabilities” used in the private sector puts the number even higher, at $27 billion.

“It’s not a crisis. It’s a long-run big problem: The pension system is far more costly than it ought to be,” said Charles Brecher of the Citizens Budget Commission, an independent group that advocates for changes in city and state finances. (more…)

Gov. Paterson’s proposed school budget could actually hurt the state’s chance of winning federal Race to the Top funds, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan suggested today.

Duncan told reporters this afternoon that he was surprised to learn that Paterson’s proposed budget appropriated $750 million in Race to the Top funds even before the competitive fund’s application deadline today.

“This is going to be very, very competitive, so for anyone to assume they’re getting this — that’s a bit of a leap of faith, I would say,” Duncan said. “And obviously if this money is seen as simply something that is going to be plugging budget holes, that’s not something we’re going to be interested in.”

Duncan made the statement in a conference call where he explained President Obama’s intention to open the Race to the Top competition up to local school districts, instead of just states. (more…)

The man who made sure the city’s school budget vote was legal used his own vote to say no to the proposed budget.

A key reason Patrick Sullivan opposed is that school officials still had not responded to a long list of budget questions he submitted two weeks ago, Sullivan told me. The questions, which are posted in full after the jump, reflect the difficulty of getting information from the department.

Here’s one of Sullivan’s questions:

Last time we had this exchange we were told DOE does not know how many charter students are in DOE facilities. But then at the Bronx meeting Kathleen Grimm said we do know. Can someone tell us please?

Sullivan is often the only member of the school board, currently known as the Panel for Educational Policy, to speak out against the mayor’s policies. But he wasn’t the only panel member asking questions about the budget at this morning’s surprise school board meeting. Two other members appointed by borough presidents (Sullivan was appointed by Manhattan’s Scott Stringer) also asked question, but they ended up voting yes to the budget.

“The difference is that unless they provide this, I’m not going to support the budget,” Sullivan said.

Below the jump, the full list of questions Sullivan sent the DOE that remained unanswered today:

(more…)

The city budget for the next school year could have ended up invalidated as illegal, were it not for a few pointed questions from a Manhattan father.

Patrick Sullivan, who in addition to being a dad is the only member of the citywide school board who regularly votes against the Bloomberg administration’s proposals, approached a City Council member this Monday after reading newspaper accounts that the mayor and the council had reached a budget deal. Stories said a vote was planned for this week (in fact, it’s happening today).

“I was kind of surprised, because we hadn’t approved the budget yet,” Sullivan told me today.

Indeed, the 2002 state education law that is under the microscope in Albany right now requires that school board members approve the city schools budget before the City Council can vote on it. But as the Council readied to vote in a budget this week, the Panel for Educational Policy had not yet voted its own approval — and wasn’t scheduled to do so until next week. (The panel members had been offered three briefings on the budget by school officials.) (more…)

Brooklyn House of Detention (via Flickr)

The fight to turn a shuttered Brooklyn jail into a school isn’t over yet. The Brooklyn House of Detention is one of several projects the city could jettison in favor of increasing its school building budget by nearly half, according to a group of school construction advocates who are holding a press conference on the subject today.

The advocates, who include Comptroller William Thompson and City Council member David Yassky, are urging the city to redirect the funds it is planning to use for prisons and police training into building more schools. They will hold a press conference this morning at 1 Centre Street, the city’s main administrative building.

Critics of the city’s proposed 5-year school construction plan say it would barely make a dent in overcrowding and wouldn’t help schools reduce their class sizes. But by moving funds from other places in its capital budget, especially from its planned spending on new jails, the city could afford to double the number of new school seats it builds in the coming years, they say.

The press conference is meant to alert council members that they can push for changes as they debate whether to approve the city’s budgets, which must happen by the end of the month. ”We’re saying to council members that they have an opportunity to strike this jail plan from the budget,” said Jamie Evans-Butler, who runs a group that opposes the Brooklyn jail plan, Stop BHOD. (more…)

With the deadline for next year’s city budget looming, elected officials are eyeing early-childhood centers slated to be cut under Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed budget as a key reduction to reverse. More than a dozen officials, including two mayoral candidates and three out of five borough presidents, decried the possible cuts today at a City Hall rally alongside hundreds of parents and workers associated with the centers.

The proposal would cut the budgets of early-childhood programs and replace kindergarten programs currently operated outside of the school system with Department of Education kindergarten classes. The city says that moving the kindergartens is necessary in order to save the Administration for Children’s Services $15 million.

But parents today said that the current programs cover the burden of child-care in a way that schools, which end at 3 p.m. and are shuttered on holidays, cannot. The programs at risk of being shut are operated out of ACS, the city’s social services arm for children, as part of larger daycare operations. Head Start, the early childhood program, is also slated to see its budget slashed by 3 percent.

Desiree Jean-Mary said she is upset that her son, Joshua, who attends a Head Start program in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, might not be able to continue there next year when he enters kindergarten. Right now, Jean-Mary, who has two other children, picks Joshua up at 5 p.m. after her job as a home health aide is over for the day. “It would be really hard if I had to find somewhere else for him to go — I don’t want that,” she said. (more…)