There are 1,793 projects posted by city teachers – mostly from high poverty schools – on DonorsChoose, a website that allows teachers across the country to describe small-scale projects that need funding. The requests paint a depressing picture of what many classrooms are lacking.

There are the occasional requests for cutting edge technology, such as iPads, tablets and digital cameras. And many of the more ambitious projects range from the creative (violins, costumes, wireless microphones) to the healthy (soccer balls, juicers, pedometers) to the icky (fetal pigs, butterfly larvae, composting worms). But most teachers seem to be asking for classroom staples such as pens, paper, and glue.

Here’s what we saw when we checked out DonorsChoose today:

• More than half of all NYC projects relate to literacy and language, a focus of the Department of Education’s this year. Many teachers, hoping to make their reading areas more appealing, are asking for beanbag chairs, rugs, library shelves and books. Ms. Coneys, from Thurgood Marshall Academy in Manhattan, is requesting a class set of “Things Fall Apart”  for her students. She writes: “School supplies have become less of a priority, and asking students to go out and buy a book they have never heard of is even more difficult. That being said, it’s apparent that my students have the desire to learn something new.”
• Some basic requests highlight the irony of classrooms that have been gifted with Smart Boards and printers, but lack compatible computers and ink. “What good is having computers if we can’t print the work we just did? We have been blessed with lots of technology in our school, however we struggle to pay for ink cartridges,” Ms. Glembocki, of Brooklyn’s School for Math Science Design and Technology, wrote.
• Threatened arts programs are reaching out for help sustaining their presence in their schools. Ms. Achu from Mott Hall Bridges Middle School in Brooklyn writes: “Art…it’s always the first cut, but the most needed. Our funding limitations didn’t allow us to offer art. We soon realized how necessary this outlet is for kids. Many times they bring the wear and tear from their home lives into a school subject such as art to express themselves in a positive manner.”
• Teachers who want to push their students to the next level are asking for the means to do so. For example, Mr. Murphy’s students at Manhattan’s Frederick Douglass Academy has had a 92 percent pass rate on the AP European History exam but their review books are worn. “Challenges? How about massive budget cuts in an inner-city school that continues to pursue the thoroughly attainable dream of acceptance to a competitive College or University,” Mr. Murphy writes. “Our school is fighting that nearly impossible fight, and going into battle is all the more difficult without the proper weapons.”
• And some teachers, are using their projects to make their students more comfortable during the school day. Ms. Metcalf from P.S. 70 Max Schoenfeld School in the Bronx is requesting healthy snacks for her students. She writes: “Do you know how hard it is to focus on tackling a word problem or writing an essay when you’re hungry? 97% of my students receive free lunch and do not have the means to bring a snack with them every day, and since we eat lunch at 1:50, they depend on healthy snacks to get through the day.”

City Councilmember Robert Jackson speaks at a protest against cuts to arts education on the steps of City Hall.

Roughly 350 arts specialists will be among the 4,000 teacher layoffs next year if the City Council signs onto Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed budget, according to a report released today by an arts education advocacy group.

Building on 135 arts positions eliminated this school year, the layoffs would amount to a 20 percent reduction in the number of arts teachers working in city schools in just the last three years.

Eight City Council members and dozens of angry parents came to City Hall today to announce the report, prepared by the Center for Arts Education, and to protest the potential cuts.

Gretchen Mergenthaler, whose eight-year-old son Declan attends P.S. 98 in Inwood, said that he is offered either art or music once each week, but no dance or theater.

“We have a gorgeous auditorium that we don’t even use,” Mergenthaler said. “This is a picture of P.S. 98 before any budget cuts. Can you imagine it after?”

Today’s report is an analysis of data that the city has been releasing since it overhauled the way arts funding is allotted to schools.

The overhaul gave principals the freedom to determine their own arts spending, but required that they report their decisions in more detail than had happened previously. The idea was that reporting requirements would serve as a way to hold principals accountable for investing sufficiently in the arts.

“We’re going to help them,” CAE director Richard Kessler said in 2007, adding, “And hold their feet to the fire.”

Kessler was vocal in his criticism of the changes then, which prompted the Center for Arts Education to move from working with schools to evaluating the city’s arts programs.

The city has maintained that the changes have not hurt the quality of their arts offerings.

In a statement, Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott said that in the last eight years, city schools have become models for arts instruction and the number of students receiving arts instruction has increased.

“So even with impending layoffs, I am confident we will be able to build on the significant progress we have made revitalizing arts in the schools,” he said.

But today’s report paints a dismal picture of what has happened since. In addition to losses in the number of arts teachers, funding for art supplies also dropped to about $2 per student in the 2009-10 school year.

“What can you buy with two dollars? A box of chalk? A couple of paintbrushes?” said Doug Israel, the director of research and policy at the Center for Arts Education. “Especially here in New York City, it’s surprising and shocking that this would occur.”

During the rally, Council Member Robert Jackson, who chairs the council’s education committee, held a paper microphone and a sad-face mask up to his face and pretended to cry. “I need my programs in art and music and theater!” he said.

Jackson, whose daughter is a dancer, said, “If children couldn’t sing, dance, play instruments, they’d be crying.”

Other parents said that’s already happening. Carlton Curry, whose seven-year-old daughter Carleta attends P.S. 126 in the Bronx, said that cultural nights at his school have had to be rescheduled because of problems getting supplies.

After the rally, Jackson said that he still believed that it was possible to fend off the cuts if elected officials and parents keep the pressure on the mayor and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.

“I think it’s realistic, it’s possible, if the parties are willing to be flexible,” Jackson said. “The game plan is to continue the press conferences, the rallies, the phone calls, all the things necessary to communicate how important this is.”

Center for Arts Education Report, 6/9/11

With Domenic Recchia, chair of the council’s finance committee, Quinn unveiled the proposal today at a hearing on the DOE’s proposed operating budget. The proposal came with a stern warning that council members are unlikely to approve a city budget that requires teacher layoffs.

“Make no mistake — we well do everything in our power to prevent teacher layoffs,” Quinn and Recchia said in a statement.

Mayor Bloomberg has said since November that the city will have to cut more than 6,000 teaching positions to balance the budget, and that 4,100 of the job losses would come from layoffs. His proposed budget reflects a $350 million gap for teacher salaries.

Council members think that money can be found elsewhere in the department’s budget and have already identified $75 million in cuts the department should make, Quinn said.

Quinn is not the first to suggest that the department could prevent teacher layoffs by cutting its budget elsewhere. But her voice is significant because she is the one who must broker a deal between council members and the city to get a budget approved before the end of this month. Identifying new cost-cutting options for the DOE is “a top focus of our budgetary negotiations,” she said in a statement.

According to the city’s proposed budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1, the department is $350 million short of being able to fund its teaching spots. Mayor Bloomberg is pushing to close that gap by eliminating more than 6,000 teaching spots, 4,100 by layoffs.

Insiders say council members are likely to grill Walcott on why the city’s layoff estimates haven’t wavered, despite two changes in chancellors since Bloomberg first unveiled them in November. They are also likely to demand why the city didn’t cut other parts of the department’s budget that doesn’t directly affect the classroom, such as transportation and special education, both of which are projected to see a big spending boost next year.

Many council members have said they don’t think layoffs are necessary to balance the city’s budget, and a few say they won’t vote for a budget that includes layoffs. Robert Jackson, chair of the council’s education committee, is among the elected officials set to appear at a rally against the layoffs proposal an hour before the hearing’s 10 a.m. start. He’ll be joined by Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, who has been lobbying against the proposed layoffs on his own; Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who advocates cutting contract spending to boost the staff budget; and other officials.

But most council members haven’t stated where they stand so clearly. Tomorrow’s hearing is a chance for them to signal their intentions, offer suggestions for alternative cuts, and construct a roadmap for a month of political jockeying over the city’s spending plans.

Between the end of the council’s budget hearings on Monday and the end of June, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn must broker a deal between the council and the city to get the budget approved. Last year, council members allocated most of their discretionary spending to keeping their vow not to approve a budget that cut school spending. In exchange, the city agreed to cut central spending at the DOE and several other departments.

This year, reaching a deal that fully restores school cuts could be a taller order. Many council members are still chafing over having had to cut services to senior citizens last year. Those services are again on the chopping block, as are daycare programs, firehouses, libraries, and other services important to council members’ local communities. Council members know that using all their discretionary budget to restore school cuts would leave these other services out to dry while averting only half of the city’s planned teacher layoffs — hardly a politically expedient resolution.

In November of last year, city officials estimated that they would need to increase earlier seat construction projections in the face of overcrowding in schools. At the time, they planned for 50,074 new seats to be built by 2014, many of them in elementary and middle schools where demand had ballooned.

Then came a proposal from Governor Andrew Cuomo to cap state spending on school construction aid. The plan would have significantly reduced the state’s contribution. To absorb the cut, city officials said they wouldn’t be able to build thousands of the seats they had planned on — a decision that would have affected schools in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and Riverdale, Bronx, the most.

But now that Cuomo’s proposal has not been included in the budget agreement, the numbers have changed again. With $1.7 billion more to spend on school construction, the city can now afford to build about 26,500 seats, instead of the roughly 14,000 it had planned on.

City officials said that more information about which neighborhoods would benefit from the seat construction increase, and which would not feel any effect, would be released tomorrow.

CHANCELLOR-DESIGNEE WALCOTT ANNOUNCES 12,000 SCHOOL SEATS AND $1.75 BILLION RESTORED TO DEPARTMENT’S CAPITAL PLAN

Meeting with Assembly and Senate Education Committees in Albany, Chancellor-Designee Walcott Says Swift Action by Legislature Helps City Restore Nearly 12,000 School Seats for Construction

Chancellor-Designee Dennis M. Walcott today announced a new proposed amendment to the Department of Education’s Five-Year Capital Plan, which restores 11,979 school seats for construction and $1.75 billion in total funding for the plan. The amendment to the Fiscal Year 2010 – 2014 Five-Year Capital Plan now proposes funding for 28,866 new school seats citywide and a total investment of $11.1 billion over five years.  The Chancellor-Designee was in Albany to meet with the State’s Assembly and Senate Education Committees.

“For months now, we have faced the prospect of big cuts in aid from Albany that would have meant fewer new school seats and more overcrowding,” said Chancellor-Designee Walcott. “Today, I’m pleased to announce that the Legislature has come through for New York City, putting us back on track to add over 28,000 seats in neighborhoods with the most need. We’re also investing in critical technology and infrastructure for our schools and moving forward with a plan to improve energy use and environmental quality of our buildings. I’d like to thank the Legislature, and particularly Assembly Education Chair Cathy Nolan and Senate Education Chair John Flanagan, for their leadership in protecting State support for school construction.”

The new April amendment to the capital plan restores funding by $1.75 billion, bringing the total to $11.1 billion over five years. The portion of that total dedicated to capacity is now $4.6 billion, a $1.7 billion restoration, which funds a total of 28,866 seats for construction or design. The new amendment also brings capital investment to $6.5 billion in order to fund critical upgrades to school infrastructure, including an additional $141 million for the City’s comprehensive plan to increase energy efficiency and environmental quality in public schools.

In February, the Department proposed an amendment to the capital plan based on the Governor’s original proposed cap on building aid, which would have cut the State’s commitment to the City by 48% and forced the delay of 17,000 new seats. The Governor’s proposal was not included in the State’s adopted budget. With State funding restored, the Department is now able to fund 26,552 seats for construction and an additional 2,314 seats for design. The 26,552 seats fully funded for design and construction is a nearly 12,000 seat increase over the February amendment.

The new April amendment will be reviewed and voted on by the Panel for Educational Policy. It will then be forwarded to the City Council for review and approval as part of the City’s annual budget adoption process.

The School Construction Authority manages new school construction and renovation of the City’s existing school buildings for the Department of Education. Over the last seven years, the City has improved construction efficiency and implemented a comprehensive capital planning process that ensures school construction keeps pace with student demand. Through these efforts, more than 100,000 school seats have been constructed since 2003, including 24,995 in the Bronx, 24,463 in Brooklyn, 12,987 in Manhattan, 32,524 in Queens, and 5,619 in Staten Island.

Spending going directly to schools would decrease along with the number of teachers in the city, while spending on instructional administration, transportation, and school food would all increase if Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed 2012 budget is passed.

Those are among the findings of an analysis of the mayor’s proposed 2012 budget released by the Independent Budget Office today.

The budget also calls for cutting spending on general education and special education instruction by between 1 and 2 percent and making large cuts to funds for school facilities and safety. The cuts to classroom spending include the loss of more than 6,000 teaching positions, with more than 4,600 of those positions lost through layoffs.

Meanwhile, spending on the DOE’s central administration would grow by 10 percent from this school year, though it would still be lower than it was between 2005 and 2010.

The IBO analysis also predicts that the city will have a slightly smaller surplus to roll over into next year than the Bloomberg administration has estimated, $2.9 billion compared to the mayor’s estimate of $258 million more. The surplus has attracted attention from the teachers union, which points to its existence to argue that the mayor shouldn’t have to lay off teachers.

But the analysis shows that neither surplus would be enough to use to plug the projected 2012 shortfall.

The IBO actually estimates that the city will actually still have a small shortfall of roughly $200 million in 2012 even if the city makes the dramatic cuts proposed in Bloomberg’s budget and even if the state sends the city the extra $600 million in funds it is requesting.

Although spending on services to schools is declining by $207 million, both the overall Department of Education spending and the city’s contribution to it are increasing.

That’s because the city has seen a shift in the distribution between two sets of education spending — funding that goes to district schools, on one hand, and funding that goes to charter and nonpublic schools, on the other. For the first time since at least 2007, the first pot, to district schools, is actually decreasing, but the amount sent to charter schools and nonpublic schools is rising.

The increase is driven in part by an increase in enrollment at charter schools, which the city funds based on a state formula. Other programs under this bucket include special education pre-kindergarten programs, contract schools, foster care programs and so-called “Carter Cases,” which require the city to reimburse parents for private tuition for students with special needs that public programs do not serve.

The amount of money that the Department of Education has spent on charter schools has tripled in the last four years, the report says, with funds for next year set to increase 30 percent from this year. The funding has increased because enrollment at charter schools has grown as more schools are opened and older schools grow to serve more grades.

While the number of students enrolled at city charter schools has been growing and will almost certainly continue to grow as the schools expand and more open, the report notes that the city has not seen a decline in the number of students enrolled in traditional public schools.

“Regardless of how many charter school students would otherwise have attended public schools, the fact remains that — at least for now — the public schools are being asked to educate roughly the same number of students with a reduced budget available for services to schools,” the report says.

Today’s report focuses on explaining how the mayor’s budget distributes funds and presents the office’s revenue predictions. In several weeks, the IBO will release another report offering alternate budget options that could be adopted.

Read the IBO’s full report (PDF) here .

The budget, released today, proposes reducing statewide school spending by $1.5 billion from this year’s level. Activists said that would be the largest dollar figure cut to public schools in New York’s history.

The proposal would bring the state’s contribution to city schools close to the level received in 2007. That year ushered in substantial funding increases after a court ordered New York State to reduce historic funding inequities by pouring billions of extra dollars into the New York City schools.

Governor Andrew Cuomo's proposed budget for fiscal year 2011, denoted with the asterisk, would reduce the state's spending on New York City public schools to $7.5 billion.

Planned increases have since been frozen, cut, and now frozen again. Cuomo’s budget suggests postponing them into the future.

Mayor Bloomberg described the budget in drastic terms, comparing Cuomo’s proposed city schools allocation — $7.5 billion — to the figure state budget officials projected last year. That projection was $8.8 billion, a nearly $1.4 billion difference.

In a statement this afternoon, Bloomberg argued that a cut of that size would lead to “thousands of layoffs in our schools and across city agencies.” He pushed Cuomo and the state legislature to reduce the loss to city schools by cutting teacher pensions and loosening requirements for special education.

The New York City teachers union downplayed Cuomo’s budget. United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said that Chancellor Cathie Black should be able to make the needed cuts without laying off teachers.

“The Governor’s planned cut to New York City schools amounts to about three percent of the school system’s budget,” Mulgrew said in a statement. “We have every confidence that Cathie Black, whose management skills the Mayor has repeatedly cited, will be able to manage a reduction like this without laying off teachers and raising class sizes.”

The contrasting statements reflect the different political priorities of the union and the mayor. While the mayor has long argued for reductions in rapidly rising teacher pension costs, the teachers union has pushed the Bloomberg administration to preserve teacher benefits by cutting central programs instead, such as the data warehouse known as ARIS.

Last year, a similar back-and-forth — with Bloomberg warning of teacher layoffs and the union downplaying — ended when a combination of a wage freeze and the federal stimulus prevented any teacher layoffs. This year, there is no stimulus funding to plug holes.

“There’s no way that you’re not going to be cutting around the state teachers, programs, psychologists, librarians — you name it,” said Geri Palast, the executive director of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity. “This is going to be the worst year yet. There’s no question.”

Bloomberg’s teacher layoff predictions have swung wildly this year. He began 2011 by predicting that the city would have to lay off 6,100 teachers and by the end of last week, had reached an estimation of 21,000 teachers. He eventually backed away from that figure, noting that it was not feasible and promising to find other ways to make cuts.

In his statement on the governor’s budget, Bloomberg did not say how the proposed cuts would affect the city’s layoff estimates, though he numbered likely school layoffs in the “thousands.” He also called — again — for an end to seniority-based teacher layoffs and asked for the state’s help with rising education costs.

The governor’s budget does indicate that Cuomo intends to lower these types of mandated cost increases, but it’s not clear how. The budget states:

“State Aid reductions are coupled with a mandate relief effort, undertaken by Executive Order, which will lower the system-wide cost of providing education services, thus mitigating the impact of decreases in aid.”

Under Cuomo’s budget, the city would also lose $305 million in unrestricted aid that the mayor had figured into his 2012 budget projections. While that funding is not specifically set aside for schools, it could have been used as needed.

Cuomo’s budget also includes competitive funding pools — designed like state versions of the Race to the Top competition — that would reward school districts for cost-savings and academic improvement. He first proposed the pools last month.

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.”

Between 2005 and 2008, Gonzalez saw his budget jump by nearly $1 million. The vast majority of that increase came in 2006 and was spent on the teacher pay raises that were negotiated the year before.

Another boost came during the 2007-08 school year, when the city began receiving billions more dollars in state aid as part of the court-mandated Contracts for Excellence program. But Gonzalez, who calls M.S. 223 a “rainy day fund school,” didn’t spend that money all at once. His savings have helped buoy him through cuts that have averaged citywide to about 12 percent since 2007.

Every year when Gonzalez receives his budget from the city, he goes through a list of priorities of spending and saving. Like many schools, roughly 80 percent of the M.S. 223′s budget is spent paying for teacher salaries, he said.

Next, he sets aside between $100,000 and $120,000 for savings. Sometimes he can roll over even more between school years — last summer, he was able to carry over $214,000 into last school year. Then, he goes through a list of what he calls “sub-priorities,” including professional development and the school’s arts programs. These costs don’t fluctuate much from year to year, so Gonzalez can easily determine how much money he needs to spend to keep his programs going.

And when there is a gap between the amount he wants to spend and what the city has allocated, or if he wants to add a new program, he turns to grants. ”I have to plan so that if we don’t find it from one place, we’ll find it from another,” he said.

Gonzalez estimates that he and his staff write approximately 10 to 15 grant proposals each year, with the hope of winning five of them.

“I don’t have control at all of what the city gives me,” he said. “I do have control over writing the grants. Like any good organization, you have to have multiple sources of income.”

Gonzalez has benefitted from his school’s relative stability, which helps him know exactly how to plan. M.S. 223′s enrollment has hovered between 450 and 470 students since 2005, and the demographics of his students also have stayed fairly constant. Two very senior teachers retired this year, and because their replacements are not at the highest end of teachers’ pay scale, the average salary of his teaching staff will decline slightly next year.

Right now, Gonzalez has $3,747,991 allocated for next school year. That’s down roughly $248,000 from his budget last year. But Gonzalez cautioned that he’s still expecting funds from several private and government grants to come through. “At the end of the day, we might be even over last year’s budget,” he said.

But things could change, Gonzalez warns. As his teachers gain more experience, the proportion of his budget spent on teacher salaries will grow. (In the 2008-09 school year, more than 70 percent of his teachers had master’s degrees or higher, and nearly 23 percent had more than 5 years of teaching experience.)

And as public funds for schools continue to decline, Gonzalez predicts that more and more principals will follow his lead and turn to energetic grant-writing.

“If everyone at the DOE went out and got money, that would mean there’d be a little less for everyone,” he said. “Right now we’re sort of the ones in the know.”

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.

In the first scenario, principals would make individual decisions about which positions to eliminate in their schools. The principal of a school with greater need for math than science teachers could decide to let go the most junior science teacher, for example. But in the case of citywide layoffs, this method would create a “bumping” process of teachers throughout the city, Klein said. If the junior science teacher at the first principal’s school is more senior than a science teacher at another school, the first teacher would move to the second school to take the more junior teacher’s place. The second principal would be left with the same number of science teachers, but different staff.

The alternative to that process, Klein said, is for the DOE to centrally decide how many teachers should be let go in each license area. Under that scenario, schools who have the most junior teachers system-wide would lose those teachers, regardless of how essential the principal deems those teachers’ subject areas to be. A principal who feels that her school needs more math than science teachers, for example, may nonetheless lose more math teachers if the math teachers were hired recently.

“We’re trying to balance these competing interests,” Klein said. “Neither one, in my view, is optimal.” Klein invited principals to send him feedback about the best way to plan for layoffs.

Throughout the session, Klein emphasizes that no details are yet carved in stone because of the lack of a state budget, which is six weeks overdue.

The webinar is about 40 minutes long, and I sped through it just once. Please post interesting points you hear that I’ve missed in the comments.

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.

No state cuts will be final until the Assembly signs off on a similar bill. Even if the Assembly eases the blow, though, big cuts in city spending will likely come next. Earlier today, city Budget Director Mark Page sent a letter to city agency heads asking them to prepare for further cuts in anticipation of Albany’s eventual budget — on top of cuts that have been planned since Bloomberg laid out a draconian budget (PDF) in January.

The first budget laid out $317 million in cuts to the Department of Education, a 4 percent cut. Now, Page is asking school officials to prepare for an additional 2.7 percent cut.

When they testified in Albany earlier this year, Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein argued that the real cost of the budget cuts to the city school system would be even worse than the governor’s budget proposal suggests. In his testimony, Klein estimated that the cuts to city schools would hit closer to $600 million, because of changes in costs and a freeze in the foundation aid that the city receives.

Another detail to note: the Senate’s plan has preserved the total amount of the governor’s proposed cuts but changed how the cuts would be distributed statewide, but I have yet to see exactly how the Senate’s distribution would hit New York City.

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.
• We did not adjust for charter school demographics, save the case of Opportunity Charter School, which we know enrolls a large number of special education students. For this comparison, we looked at overall per pupil spending.
• Unlike the IBO’s report, we include the total amount that charter schools spent in 2007-2008, which contains philanthropy and federal funding sources, such as Title I monies.
• For charter schools, we looked at how much they spent per pupil, as reported in their 2007-2008 audits. To this number, we added $3,735, which is the estimated value of the amount of in-kind services that charters received from the DOE in 2007-2008. (Since the IBO report estimated the value of services received in 2008-2009, we adjusted their number by 5% to account for the slightly smaller DOE budget in 2007-2008.)
• Some charter schools did not have audits available for 2007-2008. To correct for this, we looked at their expense numbers from 2008-2009 and decreased them by 13%. The 13% decrease is meant to adjust for the fact that charter schools received only $11,023 per pupil in 2007-2008 versus $12,443 in 2008-2009.

Finally, in addition to these calculations, we created an accessible Excel database of school-specific spending information available for most traditional public schools. This data includes breakdowns of specific spending components, such as teacher compensation. It was compiled from pages like this one available on the DOE website.

As always, we welcome feedback and suggestions for future areas of research!

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.

Sources of the “big problem”

At the center of the mismatch between what is promised and what was saved is the basic structure of what is called a “defined benefit” pension. A typical defined benefit plan promises a certain annual payout to retirees, usually in the form of a percentage of the retiree’s final annual salary. In New York, these payouts are defined by law and are not adjusted to reflect how much a member contributes over time.

Nobody expects the amount a member contributes to fully fund his promised pension. The idea is that the difference will be made up through a combination of taxpayer dollars and market returns.

The problem is that since 2000 a slew of factors have made this gap between how much teachers put in and how much they take out larger than ever before. One reason is that salaries have gone up 43 percent in the past decade, hoisting up the final amount retirees can expect each year. Current teachers’ pay-ins, based on higher salaries, help a bit. But the effect is dampened by the fact that even as teacher salaries have gone up, the proportion of member contributions used to pay for the plan in each year has gone down. In 1999, teachers’ contributions made up 18 percent of the total. In 2009, they were only 6 percent.

Another gap-widening factor is the fact that, for the past decade, a state law has allowed the highest-paid teachers in the city to opt out of contributing to the pension altogether. The rule has changed with the start of a new pension system for employees entering work today.

In addition to raising salaries, the city has also granted a series of pension sweeteners in exchange for union concessions. In 2007, teachers with 25 years of service won the right to retire at age 55 with no penalty, a union victory that came in exchange for a touted performance-based pay deal.

The sweeteners reduced the retirement contributions for teachers and principals, putting more of the burden to pay for pensions onto the city. They also allowed per diem salary — money teachers make for taking on extra tasks like running after-school clubs and sports — to be counted in the overall final salary number. And, in 2008, a provision allowed teachers to retire early without being dinged in their pension earnings.

Together, the rising salaries and pension sweeteners have created a perfect storm: increasing costs just as the plan’s performance has plummeted in the down market. Although the TRS has not performed significantly worse than the market according to the new report, the annual rate of return it assumes — 8 percent — is high by most private standards. (To be fair, most public pension plans also use a number around 8 percent. Similar private sector plans assume a rate of around 4 percent.)

Assuming a steady and high rate of return leaves little room for error. Imagine that the fund fails to make 8 percent returns one year and instead breaks even. To recover the lost ground the next year, TRS will have to make last year’s 8 percent and this year’s, a total of 16 percent returns. The recession of the past two years has followed this pattern of compounding losses. As a result, the fund was so far behind last year that even the high market returns from earlier in the decade couldn’t make up for the losses.

All of this has left taxpayers to make up the burden. In the late 1990s, the amount the city put into the pension fund every year was around $500 million in today’s dollars. By 2009, the sum the city had to contribute ballooned to $2.2 billion. 

This amount is incredibly high, especially compared to the New York State Teachers Retirement System, which serves all teachers outside of New York City. Last year, the state contributed half as much to its teacher retirement system as New York City contributed to the TRS, even though there are twice as many retirees in the rest of the state as there are in the city.

Even the new Tier V pension plan, which increased all new teachers’ required contribution to the plan and doubled the amount of time before they can qualify to draw a pension, has not alleviated all costs. That’s because the Tier V law included a special provision for New York City’s teachers that no other plan received, allowing them to retire with a full pension at age 55 if they’ve taught for 27 years. Teachers in the rest of the state must wait until age 57 to retire with a full pension.

Though the city is not benefiting as much from Tier V as the rest of the state, Tier V reforms are still expected to save the city $19.1 million next year, according to Division of Budget estimates.

But E.J. McMahon, of the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, warns that Tier V will do little to close the TRS’s budget gap. Instead of making retirement benefits fundamentally sustainable, Tier V actually turns back the clock to before the recent decade of pension sweeteners, he argues. Tier V “does not deserve the label reform,” McMahon said.

Brecher doesn’t even think Tier V merits its name. “They call it that, but it’s not really a tier in the sense that it’s a big change in the benefit structure,” he said.

Grim prospects

Going forward, the city cannot alter any current TRS member’s benefits due to a state law that prohibits the public pensions from being “diminished [or] impaired.” Only a handful of states have this provision, which guarantees that pension reforms affect only future teachers.

One possible alternative for the future is a cash balance plan, which California and Nebraska have adopted for their employees. Cash balance plans blend features of the TRS model (the defined benefit plan) with features of private sector pensions, known as defined contribution plans, to spread out risk more evenly among employees and employers. Although cash balance plans were surrounded by controversy when they were first introduced, in recent years they have been gaining popularity in academic and public policy circles.

Another option is a straightforward defined contribution plan, like the 401k plans that are offered to private sector workers and even some CUNY and SUNY faculty. Such plans are subject to market fluctuations and are dependent on the quality of investment advisors, but some consider them less likely to see costs spiral out of control.

“Anything that has a defined benefit at the end of it … is complicated, more costly and subject to manipulation by the union through a legislature that doesn’t understand it,” McMahon said.

Any of these alternative pension plans could make their way into city teachers’ contract one day, but for now the UFT is publicly committed to at most tweaking the current system, as Mulgrew indicated before legislators yesterday.

“We believe in a defined-benefit plan,” said Dick Riley, a UFT spokesman, adding that he would not discuss contract negotiations with the media.

Whatever happens, making TRS sustainable is likely to require city teachers to give up some of the perks of their profession.

“It’s up to the union to decide whether they’re going to make some concessions on these benefits or take layoffs and both deprive kids of educational services or members of their jobs,” said Brecher of the Citizen’s Budget Commission. “That’s the trade-off.”

Kim Gittleson is a research assistant employed by Ken Hirsh, a GothamSchools funder and contributor.

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. That change would be a boon to New York City, which Duncan has cited as a model district but whose access to the grants is dependent on state-level policy decisions. If Obama gets his way, the district-level grant program will come online next year, along with a $1.35 billion expansion of the program.

Local officials said Paterson’s proposed budget showed a strong effort but could end up disproportionately hurting the city.

“The proposed reduction in school aid will affect funding for our city’s students at a time when we are still waiting to receive our just due as a result of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, adding insult to injury,” said City Comptroller John Liu.

Mayor Bloomberg said he would reserve final judgment on Paterson’s budget plan until after his visit to Albany on Monday.

Here’s Bloomberg’s full statement:

Not only is New York City willing to do its fair share to help Albany get out of its financial mess, but we’re eager to do so. An implosion of State government would have horrible consequences for the City. Some areas of the Governor’s budget proposal today appear, at first glance, to be proportional and fair in the way they affect New York City, and he deserves credit for those areas. Unfortunately, the proposal to eliminate two years of New York City’s revenue sharing payment — more than $650 million, which is 94 percent of the statewide cut and more than 15 times the cut for entire rest of the state together — appears neither proportional nor fair to New York City. I’m going to Albany to testify about the specifics of the Governor’s proposed budget on Monday, and will speak in detail then about the effect this and other parts of the budget will have on New York City.  

And here’s the full statement from Liu:

The Governor has worked hard to put forth an ambitious plan aimed at closing our State’s widening budget gap and putting New York back on track, and to do so with minimal use of one-shots. Some of the initiatives proposed today, however, impose a disproportionate burden upon New York City.

The proposed reduction in school aid will affect funding for our City’s students at a time when we are still waiting to receive our just due as a result of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, adding insult to injury. In addition, the elimination of more than $300 million from the Aid and Incentives for Municipalities funding will leave an immediate hole in our City’s budget. And with more than $1 billion set aside in the State’s Rainy Day Fund, it’s time to recognize that it is now pouring rain, and the use of these rainy day funds can and must be managed more tightly.

 

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:

List of Unanswered Questions Provided June 4th.

Enrollment

It is essential that we understand enrollment trends as dropping enrollment does not square with the budget increases we are seeing.

Many costs for charter school operations — facilities, food, transport — are borne by the DOE budget. 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?

You point us to the online S-FORMS but I don’t see charter schools there.
Please provide a list of charters with an indication of their DOE facility number, enrollment, and other blue book statistics.

Unit of Appropriation 401,402, 403, 404

What are costs for scoring state tests? Do schools bear them?
What are costs for scoring G&T tests? Do schools bear them?

415, 416, 453, 454 Central and Field

Please provide more detail on specific cuts and increases.
Many “cuts” at this level appear to actually be reassignment of costs to schools. Which cuts will likely result in increased costs for schools?
What are costs for periodic assessments?

What is the budget and head count of the press office?
What is the budget and head count of the office of accountability?
The percentage of children classified as special education continues to increase. Does anyone know why?

438 Transportation

Why is this cost increasing when enrollment is decreasing?
Can you show the numbers by borough and type of school (public/charter/non-public)? By type of cost – metro card / busing?
It is an enormous number — 1 billion+. Is there a more detail available? By school? By provider of transportation services?

440 School Food Service

Why increasing?
Please show costs or units (meals) by type and level of school.

442 School Safety

Why is this increasing? There needs to be cuts here in accordance with cuts to schools.

444 Energy and Leases

Can we see energy separately from leases?

461 Fringe Benefits

Where does funding for UFT merit bonuses come from?
Will merit bonuses be incorporated into the pattern wage increase or will they be incremental to pattern increases?

481 Categorical Programs

Please provide detail of funding by program.

Debt Service

What is in this number?
Please show separately for public schools, charters, private schools utilizing city bonding authority, etc.

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.)

Sullivan said that the lawmaker he spoke to did not realize the PEP had to approve a budget before a Council vote. “But I don’t really think it’s the council’s business,” Sullivan said. “It’s the education department’s business.”

He added of the Department of Education, “I’m particularly astonished that they would do this right now, when Albany is being asked to consider measures to increase the autonomy of the panel. It’s pretty remarkable, if you think about it.”

In a rush to make sure they were complying with the law, school officials called a hastily arranged PEP meeting for 10:30 this morning. Lynn Cole, who coordinates the school board, let members know about the meeting via an e-mail message sent out at 6:06 last night:

If you have questions this evening, please email me or call Photo (REDACTED).  Please let me know your availability as soon as possible.

Javier Hernandez, who covered the meeting for the New York Times, reported that Chancellor Joel Klein said that he did not mean to go over the PEP’s head.

Mr. Klein said he never intended to hand over the budget without the panel’s signature. He had anticipated the Council would vote on it next week — after the panel had time to review it at its scheduled meeting on Tuesday, he said.

When the Council scheduled a vote this week, and legal questions about the panel’s role started to arise, the department decided to call the emergency meeting, Mr. Klein said.

“We wanted to make sure they had any action the panel would take,” Mr. Klein said.

Sullivan also made remarks at the meeting, before casting the sole ‘no’ vote to the budget, according to the Times:

“The folks and parents of Manhattan do not expect me to be a rubber stamp,” Mr. Sullivan, the lone dissenter, told the schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, who serves as the panel’s chairman. “The borough president didn’t send me here to be a potted plant.”

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.

Reopening the Brooklyn jail, building a new one in the Bronx, and replacing trailers that are currently used to house prisoners at some detention facilities, will cost the city nearly $1 billion.

The new jails are part of a city plan to disperse inmates across the five boroughs to bring them closer to their families and the social service providers that can help them. But residents of the neighborhoods that are slated to get new jails have said they don’t want them, and school construction advocates say schools don’t yet offer humane conditions, such as small classes and the elimination of trailers as classrooms.

“Our kids should come first,” said Leonie Haimson, the head of Class Size Matters, one of the press conference’s sponsors along with Stop BHOD. “I believe in humane treatment for prisoners but that sounds like kind of lame reason to me” for the city not to build new schools, she said.

Haimson said the city could free up even more money if it canceled its plan to build a 30-acre campus for the Police Academy at a time when few new police officers are being selected. It’s estimated that the project will cost the city $883 million. Because the state is required to match any money the city uses to build schools, canceling the new jails and the Policy Academy campus could net the city $3.5 billion in school construction funding, she said.

Reopening the Brooklyn House of Detention has been under debate for years. Thompson asked the city last fall to turn the jail into school space, but the city said it would start moving inmates into the space imminently. Yassky and Thompson sued the city to stop that from happening, and after a judge ruled against them, Thompson delayed the reopening by rejecting the city’s contract with an architect who would rehab the space.

Hundreds of parents, children, and day care workers protested proposed cuts to early childhood programs today at City Hall. (GothamSchools’ Flickr)

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.

Other parents said that they worry that programs for younger children will be forced to extend for a shorter period of time, forcing them to find alternate child care that would last through the end of their work days.

Elected officials used the rally, which was organized by the AFSCME public-employees union, which represents ACS workers, to criticize Bloomberg. “If you keep getting on our last nerve, we’re going to turn Gracie Mansion into a daycare,” Councilman Charles Barron, a staunch Bloomberg antagonist, said as the crowd cheered.

Tony Avella, a council member who is running for mayor, made a plug for his campaign while condemning the childcare cuts: “In a Tony Avella administration you won’t have this problem,” he said. Thompson, who’s also running, was more subtle. “The mayor is putting money before children,” he said, echoing a theme of the rally.

“We can’t balance the budget on your backs,” the council’s finance committee chair David Weprin said to the crowd.

There is some argument about exactly how much money the plan will save the city. The New York Daily News reported that moving the kindergarten programs would actually cost taxpayers an extra $7 million as the cost of education would simply shift to other agencies, not disappear. School officials are disputing that. In order to absorb the new students, the Department of Education said it will need to lift a limit on kindergarten class sizes to 25 from 20.5 to accommodate extra students.

Individual schools will still be able to use their budgets to add new teachers if they are able, but the DOE is planning to cut school budgets so far that many schools will have to shed teachers, DOE officials revealed. And any new hires, to replace teachers who leave, will have to come from teachers who are already in the system, according to new rules the department is implementing.

Klein informed principals about the hiring restrictions, which the department says should allow it to avoid actually laying off teachers, this morning during a Webcast and just now in a memo, which is included at the end of this post. The department is planning to give principals more detailed information about their schools’ budgets during the week of May 18.

Speaking to reporters today, a top DOE official, Photeine Anagnostopoulos, said she could not predict how many schools would need to eliminate teachers but said that a “high percentage” might be able to cut their budgets sufficiently by reducing non-teaching staff and axing programs. She said “the goal” for the department is for all schools to make the same percentage cut to their budgets. That size of that cut has not yet been finalized, she said, adding that principals would ultimately have discretion about how to cut their own budgets.

The new restrictions require principals to fill vacancies created by attrition by picking up current teachers who are either in a classroom elsewhere in the city or in the existing pool of excessed teachers, which already includes about 1,100 teachers. The size of the excessed teacher pool is likely to grow as principals determine that they must reduce their teaching staffs for next year because of the budget cuts.

Schools that must cut teachers will have to do so according to strict rules that include a requirement that the newest hires in each credential area go first, Larry Becker, the DOE’s head human resources executive, said today. Excessed teachers will not stay on the school’s payroll, as they have in the past, he said.

Also affected will be people who have been accepted by Teach for America or the city’s Teaching Fellows program. Becker said he anticipated that those people, who typically teach in shortage areas such as special education, would ultimately be hired by schools. But until they are, he said, the DOE will not add them to the system’s payroll.

Anagnostopoulos emphasized that the new restrictions do not represent a return to the system of forced placement, when senior teachers could “bump” newer colleagues out of positions in schools. “We are not force-placing people into schools,” she said. ”We are saying that the pool from which you as principals can choose is the pool of existing teachers.”

Responding to questions about how the cuts will affect the DOE’s central administration, Anagnostopoulos said recent budget cuts have hit Tweed disproportionately hard. She said the department would continue to fill vacant positions in its central administration but would not create new positions. “I can’t tell you when the last new hire was made,” she said.

The new restrictions suggest that the department’s true budget picture is closer to what Klein described before the City Council in March than the relatively rosy picture that Mayor Bloomberg painted last week. In March, Klein told the council that although the DOE would likely escape teacher layoffs, a significant number of other staff members might have to be laid off. Anagnostopoulos confirmed that scenario today.

The reason for the discrepancy, Klein said then and DOE officials said today in a conference call with reporters, is that the DOE’s costs are set to rise significantly because of collective bargaining agreements that guarantee certain pensions and salary increases, and because of increased costs associated with educating children with special needs.

Below is the memo that principals just received from Chancellor Klein:

Dear Colleagues,

Thank you for joining me on this morning’s webcast. I thought it was a productive conversation and I appreciated your questions. We will post the video of the webcast on the Principals’ Portal so that those of you who were not able to join us will have the opportunity to watch; in the coming days, we will be following up with more answers to the questions that you asked this morning.

In this note, I will reiterate the key points that I made during this morning’s conversation.

I don’t have all the answers-but my goal is to give you all the information I have so that you can plan more effectively for the coming school year. I feel strongly that principals are in the best position to make key educational decisions for their schools, and I want to give you the tools you need to exercise the kind of leadership that the City’s schools and schoolchildren need in these tough times. This is a hard year-and while the Federal stimulus package is making it more bearable, it does not make us whole from a budget point of view. We still face a substantial budget gap and we’re anticipating significant cuts to school budgets. The City and the State are both facing significant declines in revenue as a result of Wall Street and the overall economy.

As you know, this isn’t the first year when we’ve faced budget hardships in our school system. In the last eighteen months, we have already taken three budget cuts. We have consistently made every effort to protect schools and classrooms. During this time, we have eliminated more than 550 positions, or 8%, of the total positions in our central and field offices. We will take more cuts to central and field administration for the upcoming fiscal year, but with our central and field budgets representing only 3% of the total DOE budget, we have no choice but to find savings in our schools and classrooms. Keep in mind that we have many costs-from food and transportation to debt service and pensions-that are the price of running a big school system like ours. We have no control over many of these costs and cannot cut back in these areas.

There are a number of factors that will affect the final numbers for the 2009-10 school year, but it’s important that you know how the budget situation will affect your hiring decisions and the budget timeline for the rest of the school year. Here are the three most important facts:
FIRST, as you’ve heard me say before, principals are in the best position to know what their students and schools need to excel. This year, even though our budget situation is far from ideal, we are maintaining this principle of empowerment. We want to give you the support and flexibility you need to continue focusing on academic achievement.
SECOND, we’re expecting that the cut will be an across-the-board percentage reduction to all schools’ total budgets. While the percentage will be the same for all schools, schools will take the cuts in different ways, depending on their mix of funding streams and their mix of personnel and non-personnel allocations.
THIRD, we are going to reduce spending without laying off teachers. This is because any layoff of teaching staff is done by seniority, which would require us to force-place teachers until the least senior teachers in the City were laid off. This bumping of staff would violate the principle of empowerment and cause the kind of disruption that we need to avoid. As a result of attrition and your individual decisions to meet budget, the overall number of teachers is likely to go down, but no current teachers will be laid off. This means you will need to look carefully at cutting back other school staff and making reductions in non-personnel areas.

OUR BUDGET SITUATION

In January, when I testified before the State Senate Finance Committee and the State Assembly Ways & Means Committee in Albany, I said we faced a $1.4 billion budget gap. Thankfully, our situation today-because of the Federal intervention-is not nearly that bad. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will help the Department of Education avoid the situation I outlined in January for the 2009-10 school year. This Federal Stimulus Package money will go a long way-and help us to avoid massive layoffs. However, many of the costs over which we have little or no control have been growing. This leaves us with a substantial funding gap.

Between Fiscal Year 2009 and 2010, the price of education has gone up as teachers’ salaries have risen and as the mandated costs for special education services have grown. We also remain committed to some key priorities that the Mayor and I believe will help our schools and our students excel: things like giving you the tools you need to monitor students’ performance and progress; closing down failing schools and replacing them with new schools; and creating innovative programs like schoolwide performance bonuses to reward teachers who are successful at helping students make progress. As we face the 2009-10 school year, we all must start thinking about how we can cut back.

SCHOOL BUDGETS

The numbers are not set in stone; there are many variables. As we work to firm up the numbers, I want you to be able to start planning.

For starters, you should know that we plan to send you your preliminary 2009-10 school year budgets in the week of May 18. When you receive your budget, you will see how much you have to spend during the coming school year, and you will begin to make decisions about where you should cut back. I want to make this point clear: even in this challenging time, we are sticking with the principles that are at the heart of Children First. Our focus, as always, remains firmly on student achievement. We need to figure out a way to make sure our schools and students continue making academic progress, even as we cope with our budget situation. That may not be easy, but it’s what leadership is about.

As you approach this decision-making process, you should know that if you are one of the 825 schools that rolled over money from this school year, you will be able to use these funds to offset your cuts. In all, schools rolled over $95 million.

Even so, as you can imagine, the magnitude of the necessary cuts across our school system will mean that most schools will need to significantly reduce OTPS, per diem, and per session spending. This means potentially large cuts to after school and supplemental programs.

Some schools will have to reduce non-teaching personnel. Some schools will decide not to backfill positions, including teaching positions, which open up due to attrition. Many schools will need to eliminate teaching positions in order to make their cuts. As teaching positions are eliminated and as some vacancies are not backfilled, we predict that our system will have a couple of thousand fewer teachers next year. Just to be clear, in a normal year, if 4,000 teachers left the City’s public schools, we would hire 4,000 brand new teachers into the system. This year, we anticipate that we will not hire as many new teachers as leave through attrition. This means the number of teaching positions in the system will drop. But while some schools will lose teaching positions, others will not. At more than half of our schools, between the surplus roll, relatively large OTPS budgets, and other non-teacher funds, there will likely be enough money to implement cuts without eliminating any teaching positions.

STAFFING

In deciding how to implement the necessary reductions, we knew we could tell schools how to take cuts or we could allow schools to make the best decisions for their communities. We decided against the top-down approach, so we could give you the discretion you need to make the best decisions for your communities. In return for giving you this flexibility, I need to place certain restrictions in almost all school titles for the remainder of this fiscal year and next year.

Most significantly, effective immediately, you may only hire existing DOE staff, as opposed to people from outside the system. That means you must hire people who are working in other schools in the same titles or people who are in excess in those titles. Here are the specific restrictions:
Teachers: There will be no forced placements or layoffs of teachers. You may only hire existing DOE teachers, as opposed to people from outside the system.
Guidance Counselors, Social Workers: At this time, there will be no forced placements or layoffs of these employees. They will be treated the same as teachers, so you can only hire individuals who are already working in the same titles in our system.
School Secretaries, Paraprofessionals, School Aides, Family Workers: We will work to place excesses in vacancies and evaluate the situation to determine if layoffs are necessary.
Parent Coordinators: You may not eliminate your parent coordinator position. If your parent coordinator leaves, you may hire a new one either internally or from outside of the system.
Assistant Principals: You may not excess APs. To avoid any increases in the excess pool overall, given the limited number of assistant principal vacancies that we can expect, assistant principals should not be excessed. Vacant positions may be eliminated, and you can fill vacancies under existing procedures with any qualified candidate.

We are imposing these restrictions because we cannot afford to support a growing excess pool, which currently includes 1,400 staff in all titles. Any growth in the excess pool means less money that can go into schools and classrooms. The goal here is to try to absorb the reductions systemwide through attrition. We know there might not be an exact match at each school, but systemwide, there is a high likelihood that the number of reduced teaching positions can essentially be matched by vacancies created due to attrition.

Although you will have the discretion to make the cuts you feel are in the best interest of your schools, you should look carefully at non-personnel areas such as per session and OTPS. My staff will be reviewing your preliminary decisions regarding your budgets so that we can get a sense of what the overall impacts are on the system. While you will have the discretion to make the decisions you think best fit your schools, if these decisions seem to tilt too heavily toward excessing, I will ask that you rethink your budget priorities.

We will review our hiring restrictions weekly, and as we move forward, we might lift them in certain geographic and subject areas. For example, we may hire new teachers in shortage areas like special education and science. It is possible that for some subject and geographic areas the hiring restrictions will continue to be in effect through the opening of school.

So, to be clear: at this point, you can interview and select any teacher who is currently working in a public school or is in the excess pool. As in past years, you can use the Open Market system for this purpose until August 7, when it closes. The Open Market includes both excessed staff and employees who wish to transfer. It is worth remembering that teachers newly excessed by the budget cuts will, for the most part, be new teachers who many of you have hired in the past few years.

Some of you might have made informal commitments to prospective candidates outside of our system. You should reach out to these people and tell them that they will have to wait; those jobs might not actually be there and that you are unable to hire them at this time. We are making no commitments to candidates, including Teach for America and Teaching Fellows candidates, although these programs are recruiting teachers for shortage areas where there is a stronger possibility that we will have some new needs in the coming months.

New schools will be partially subject to the new hiring restrictions. Many new schools are already under a contractual requirement to hire half of the qualified staff from closing school. All new schools must hire at least 50% from current staff (from the closing school or elsewhere in the system), but will be able to hire 50% of their teachers from outside of the system. This applies to new schools that are ramping up during their first three years.

I want to reiterate that for our hiring restrictions to work so that we can avoid bumping and forced placement, schools have to commit to hiring from within the DOE. We are going to place limitations on part-time hiring and the use of substitutes as these strategies will also undermine our ability to avoid increases in the excess pool. In addition, I want to emphasize that you should not, indeed may not, use excessing as a means of removing staff with performance issues from your schools. There is another way to deal with performance issues and we will support you in those efforts. While these restrictions limit your choices more than in most years, it is the only strategy that will preserve choice. You can decide whether to hire and whom to hire, so long as the teacher comes from within the system.

NEXT STEPS

We expect to get budgets to schools in the week of May 18. At that point, you will be able to work with your ISC and SSO budget representatives to plan your budget for the coming school year. Each school will face different choices. It is important that you work with your teachers and the other members of your school community to make the best decisions with respect to your budget.

We will review the school budget submitted by each principal to ensure that indicated reductions in teaching positions will be covered by the expected attrition across the City. If not, the principals will be provided with additional guidance to avoid some of the proposed reductions in teaching positions.

Principals with expected teacher openings from attrition and enrollment growth should immediately inform their ISCs. This way, we will be able to help you plan. You, of course, retain the power to decide who you hire.

We will hold budget meetings at the Citywide and Community Education Councils in May and June. The Panel for Educational Policy and the City Council vote on the budget in June. This is the moment when everything is finalized, so until this moment, we are working in a situation of uncertainty.

CONCLUSION

We know it’s going to be a challenging year, but working together, I’m confident we can keep focused on our shared goal of student achievement. During this difficult time, I would like to thank you for your hard work and support. I don’t think there’s any group of people better equipped to make this work than New York City principals.

If you have any follow up questions, please email DOEstaffing@schools.nyc.gov. I also encourage you to come to one of two sessions-on May 13 and May 20-when I will be discussing more details of this year’s budget situation with principals. You can register for one of these sessions by clicking here: www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB2295TMATML6. If you have specific questions about your school, you can always contact your ISC or CFN staff.

Sincerely,

Joel I. Klein

The proposed budget might still be harmful to schools, Weingarten implies in the statement:

Our schools have already absorbed cuts upwards of 10% over the last two years, and teachers are already doing more with less every day to provide a safe, nurturing environment for their students. Important after school programs such as tutoring and academic intervention services have already been affected. Additional cutbacks have the potential to dramatically alter the landscape, and attrition may mean jumps in class size.

Weingarten also argues against the creation of a new pension tier that would provide reduced benefits for employees hired in the future, something Bloomberg has been pushing to cut city costs. Earlier this spring, the UFT announced that it had identified ways for the city to save millions of dollars that would make a new pension tier unnecessary.

Weingarten’s complete statement is after the jump.

These are difficult times, and the Mayor has proposed a budget that, while we still have concerns about it, is thoughtful and responsible. We at the UFT have been working together with the city throughout this extraordinary year, first in Washington to secure federal stimulus funding, then in Albany to get restorations in the state budget, and now on behalf of working families to resolve the MTA crisis. Today’s executive budget announcement is a reminder that our work is far from over.

Our schools have already absorbed cuts upwards of 10% over the last two years, and teachers are already doing more with less every day to provide a safe, nurturing environment for their students. Important after school programs such as tutoring and academic intervention services have already been affected. Additional cutbacks have the potential to dramatically alter the landscape, and attrition may mean jumps in class size.

The Mayor once again raised a new pension tier as part of his presentation. What remained unsaid is that the pension improvements the mayor wants to jettison were in fact negotiated by city workers many times in lieu of salaries. For working and middle class families, pensions are a very important part of retirement security. Yet, there are other steps that can be taken to help further reduce the budget gap. For example, unions are ready to work with the city to secure more than $200 million in health cost savings, which is the equivalent to $600 per worker, and a retirement incentive for eligible educators would produce more immediate cost savings.

No one wants to see schools or students lose programs or services, and so moving forward, we need to work together to confront the challenges ahead. We have spent the better part of the last year fighting to preserve the safety net for New Yorkers, and we look forward to working with the administration in the months ahead. Now is the time when our kids need us to step up and be courageous. They need a quality education, and they need stability. We can’t turn our backs on them now. It would be tragic if we did.

A City Council source told Liz yesterday that the executive budget proposal Mayor Bloomberg is scheduled to reveal on Friday is likely to contain substantial school budget cuts.

But a DOE spokeswoman said the budget situation remains “fluid,” making a briefing for principals today impractical. “We’re just waiting until we have a better sense of what the actual numbers look like,” said Ann Forte of the DOE. She said the event would be rescheduled, but no time has yet been set and it is unlikely that the DOE will be able to brief principals before Bloomberg is scheduled to present his budget on Friday.

Right now, the DOE is frantically reaching out to principals to let them know that they shouldn’t come to Manhattan’s Norman Thomas High School later this afternoon after all. Forte said the department is contacting principals by phone and e-mail, and network leaders from external school support organizations are also trying to spread the word about the cancellation.