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Principals will receive school budgets tomorrow that include a new 5 percent cut, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein announced today. The cuts are so deep that the department is temporarily abandoning its plan to finish adopting a new funding formula that it said would make school budgets more equitable.

The cuts, totaling $405 million across the city schools, could threaten non-teacher staff positions, after school programs, and training for teachers. But roughly 60 percent of schools will not actually experience cuts of the maximum size, Klein told reporters at a briefing today. That’s because slightly more than half of all principals chose not to allocate every dollar in their budgets for this year, instead “rolling over” a total of $95 million. The rainy day funds are being wiped out by the new cuts but are also softening the blow of next year’s cuts for many schools.

In addition, about 80 schools receiving the largest amounts of federal anti-poverty funds will actually see a slight increase in the size of their budgets, Klein said. The remaining 40 percent of schools will see their budgets drop the maximum 4.9 percent, he said.

Today’s cuts are on top of a total average 3 percent cut made to school budgets over the last year and a half.

Because of the cuts, the DOE is suspending its plan to start charging schools the real salaries that teachers make, a change that had been the cornerstone of the department’s Fair Student Funding formula. (more…)