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The Daily News reports this morning that Governor Paterson will propose cutting $206 million from the New York City schools. Mayor Bloomberg has already guess-timated his likely cut to the schools next year at $385 million. Both numbers are moving targets, changeable if the two executives’ legislative bodies push to do so. (Recall that just a few months ago, the state legislature axed a plan by Paterson to cut state funding to schools in the middle of this school year.) 

But let’s assume that the mayor and governor do get what they’re asking for. That would be a grand total of $591 million slashed from city schools budgets in the 2009-2010 school year. We can get an extremely rough estimate of what that might look like on the ground by thinking about the cuts the mayor ordered in the middle of this school year. The cut, of $181 million, happened by eliminating 475 bureaucratic jobs; delaying or cutting a half-dozen or so small centrally administered programs; and slicing 1.3% from school budgets. If we scale each of these up by a factor of 3.2 (the amount by which $591 million is larger than $181 million), we get:

• 1,550 jobs cut from central (more…)

And he says that she contacted him. The Daily News reports:

Paterson said Weingarten, who recently also became president of the American Federation of Teachers, told him “she won’t run away” if Paterson calls on her.

“She said, ‘You know me well enough to know if you want me,’” Paterson said. “I thought she handled it very well.”

“We will consider her,” he added.

This morning Weingarten will be at the Robert F. Kennedy High School in Flushing — a school named for that former New York senator, whose family keeps cropping up in discussions of Hillary Clinton’s soon-to-be-open Senate seat. Other speakers will include Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, NYSUT President Richard Iannuzzi, and Kerry Kennedy, RFK’s daughter.

Liz Benjamin filed this into the “Department of Interesting Timing.” Agreed. NYSUT, the state teachers union, has spent the last several weeks pitching the supposed story, which is a new curriculum on RFK’s life that the union developed. The union even got a bite from at least two newspapers. Is it just a coincidence that Weingarten steps into the story the same day her name is floated?

Randi Weingarten (via Flickr)

Liz Benjamin reports that teachers union president Randi Weingarten has talked with Governor Paterson about possibly taking over Hillary Clinton’s senate seat:

Two sources confirm that “talks” have been had by the Paterson administration and Weingarten about whether she might be interested in joining the nation’s most exclusive political club.

O.M.G.!! This would allow a whole new who’s-the-next-Weingarten search. But Liz deflates with this statement from Weingarten:

UPDATE: Weingarten forwarded over a statement saying she is “very flattered and honored” to hear her name mentioned “given how many qualified candidates are under consideration to replace our great junior senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton,” and adding:

“However, I have a great new job that I am very engaged in – fighting for schools, kids and working people in the middle of the worst economic downturn of our lifetime.”

I’m very skeptical. I just got off the phone with a union insider who would almost definitely know if this was going to happen — and hadn’t heard a thing.

UPDATE. Weingarten’s full statement is below the jump. Suddenly I get the feeling Weingarten does not want the story to die completely. (more…)

Councilman Bill deBlasio at PS 154, which stopped using Styrofoam trays this spring. Photo from Gowanus Lounge

First Councilman Bill deBlasio waged war on Styrofoam lunch trays. Next Councilman Lew Fidler took up a crusade for energy-efficient light bulbs, pushing the issue at one and then another recent Council hearing. And now, there is a new petition urging Governor Paterson to make the state’s schools “incorporate green-minded curriculum into the classroom.”

So far, the Department of Education has made no indication it is boarding this bandwagon. But there was a little bit of tree-saving inside this week’s Principals Weekly, the regular memo from Chancellor Joel Klein. The memo discloses that the DOE is launching a pilot program to make surveys of teachers and students paperless. The Learning Environment Surveys, used to determine schools’ progress report letter grades, now are mailed to schools and completed by hand. Under the pilot, parents would still fill out the surveys with paper.

That could be a baby step towards footprint-reduction. Or, it could just be a way to cut costs.

Lots of state education funding news today. First, Governor Paterson removed his proposal to enact mid-year cuts. From a letter he sent to school leaders today:

While school aid reductions remain on the table, it is unlikely the Legislature will consider them any time soon. Therefore, we would be well into the final quarter of our fiscal year and even further into the school year before any action would likely occur.

So mid-year is off the table, but Paterson says that means cuts next year will have to be much worse; the state simply cannot afford to ramp up school spending as it had been doing, he wrote.

The Campaign for Fiscal Equity has already pushed out a response to this letter. The group, which led the 14-year-long lawsuit asking for more funding for New York City schools, asks Paterson to find ways to raise revenues before cutting budgets. One idea is to raise income taxes on wealthy New Yorkers.

The full letter is below the jump, and for a review of all planned budget cuts, see my cheat sheet here. (more…)

An annoying thing about budget cuts is that, in addition to being hands-down, no-question bad news, they are also usually completely obscure to the average human brain. How much will be cut? From whom? Starting when? There are so many unknowns that even paid budget experts have trouble explaining it.

Here are six things we do know, after the jump: (more…)

Governor David Paterson answering reporters' questions at a less bleak time (via Flickr)

That idea that NYSUT, the state teachers union, has been pushing, about avoiding mid-year cuts to schools — it’s starting to look about as likely as Joel Klein’s mayoral campaign.

Governor Paterson made a speech this morning offering even more dire projections on the state’s budget gap for the next four years. Earlier this month the budget gap was pegged at $1.2 billion; now it’s at $1.5 billion, according to the Daily News. The cumulative, four-year budget deficit is a historic $47 billion. According to Liz Benjamin at the Daily News, the cuts Paterson will have to make in the next year will represent almost 25 percent of the state’s general fund.

The Times also has an early story up, which includes this quote from the governor:

“Don’t get me wrong, there will be hard and painful cuts,” he said in the address. “There will be no segment of this budget that will not be cut.”

When I spoke to NYSUT President Dick Iannuzzi last week, he told me that Paterson was the single elected official who had not yet promised not to cut schools’ budgets mid-year. Maybe Paterson knew something the other Albany guys didn’t.

Paterson used the word “dire,” and it does look that way, but Liz Benjamin offers some recent history that puts the cumulative four-year deficit figure, $47 billion, into perspective:

That is the largest cumulative deficit in state history.

According to the state Budget Division, while the current deficits are the largest in absolute dollars in history, as a percentage of the general fund budget, they are similar to those faced in 2003-04.

In that year, the state closed an $11.2 billion budget gap, which represented 28.4 percent of the then $39.5 billion general fund.