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A meeting among the city’s public unions over a proposal that would help avert more than 4,100 teacher layoffs erupted in “fireworks” today, leaving prospects for a budget deal uncertain.

According to a union official who attended, dissension was sparked over the proposal to withdraw millions of dollars per month from a union-controlled health insurance fund. That money would be redirected toward closing a $270 million budget gap in the education department.

“Let’s just say there was a lot of fireworks,” the person said.

The meeting was called by Harry Nespoli, President of the Municipal Labor Committee, an umbrella organization of all of the city’s public unions. Earlier this week, he floated the idea of tapping into the fund – known as the Health Insurance Stabilization Fund – at a smaller meeting between just union leaders.

The meeting today, which was open to a larger swath of union members, was also planned by Nespoli. He said he hoped to build consensus on whether or not to move forward with negotiations. Now, it’s clear that’s not the case. (more…)

To avoid laying off teachers, the Department of Education should cut technology spending, reduce cost estimates, and condense some central offices, according to a proposal set forth today by City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.

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.

Protesters against teacher layoffs during a rally on the steps of City Hall.

Under a blazing sun, protesters rallied on the steps of City Hall today before the City Council’s education budget hearing against the Department of Education’s plans to lay off more than 4,000 teachers.

Speakers at the rally included elected officials, union leaders, parents, community advocates, and even a star of the sitcom “Third Rock From the Sun.” Dozens more — including at least 15 City Council members, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer — stood behind to cheer their support. Robert Jackson, chair of the council’s education committee, led the rally.

“Protect our children, not millionaires,” the protesters chanted in between speakers. (more…)

Chancellor Dennis Walcott will take the hotseat tomorrow morning before a City Council whose members are growing increasingly restive about the city’s proposed teacher layoffs.

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. (more…)

Mayor Bloomberg said today that if he’s able to convince Albany to reduce the city’s deficit, he won’t promise to use the money to avoid teacher layoffs.

During his presentation of the city’s budget for 2012 this morning, the mayor blamed deep cuts from the state and federal governments for his decision to layoff 4,100 teachers. Saying that it was unlikely that lawmakers in Albany would increase aid to the city at this point, he called on them to trim public employees’ pensions and cut programs it mandates the city offer, but doesn’t help the city pay for.

But if he succeeds in extracting cuts and more funding from Albany, that money isn’t necessarily going to save teachers’ jobs.

“Any moneys that Albany manages to get back to us…don’t automatically go to education,” Bloomberg said today.

“There are a lot of first priorities. There are a lot of agencies that are very important to the city. You may decide that you need one more policeman or one more fireman… there are plenty of things in addition to education,” he said. (more…)

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said today that teacher layoffs are still on the table in New York City, after Governor Andrew Cuomo’s budget deal lessened the cuts to education only slightly.

Public school teachers could probably be forgiven for rolling their eyes. For the past two years, city officials have responded to cuts in education funding with threats of teacher layoffs and for two years, the layoffs haven’t materialized.

Well aware of the city’s history of layoff threats, Bloomberg and Chancellor Cathie Black have described the budget crisis as more serious than in the past and the threats more real. They’ve lobbied Albany to change the current seniority-based layoff process and they’ve released a list of how many teachers each city school could lose.

So with that in mind, it makes sense to look back to last year, when we published a guide to how layoffs work when and if they ever happen. Some of the information is outdated — we no longer have a Governor David Paterson and the city has confirmed that a majority of the laid-off teachers would come from elementary schools — but most of it is still relevant. For example:

When will I know if I’m being laid off?
Department of Education officials hope to give principals their budgets for next year by June 1, so you could find out shortly afterward that your position has been eliminated at your school. But that doesn’t mean you’ve been laid off. (more…)

The night before a vote on Mayor Bloomberg’s favored bill to change how teachers are laid off, reporters were sent a detailed list of how many teachers each school stood to lose if the union got its way. The list gave lawmakers ammunition to back the mayor’s plan and it terrified teachers who could be affected.

But when it comes to the mayor’s own layoff strategy, the city has so far left it unexamined.

The bill the mayor supports would lay off teachers not by seniority — as the current law does. Instead, it creates nine categories of teachers who would be laid off before their peers. Among them are teachers who have been given “unsatisfactory” ratings by their principals, had too many unexcused absences, or been without a full-time teaching position for over six months.

The Department of Education has not released a similar school-by-school breakdown showing what effect the mayor’s plan would have.

In response to a request for this analysis made a week ago, a DOE spokeswoman said: “We don’t have it immediately available.”

The city’s big caveat here is that the mayor’s plan would lay off the worst teachers, regardless of where they work and who they teach. But officials have yet to explain how this would change the make-up of the city’s teachers, whether it would actually affect those with more seniority (as the union alleges), and what it would do to schools’ stability. (more…)

The argument that heated up today between city officials, Governor Andrew Cuomo and members of the state legislature over abolishing the state’s seniority-based layoff system for teachers essentially boils down to one thing: timing.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Department of Education officials want to do away with the “last-in, first-out” system immediately so that they can use new criteria to lay off teachers at the end of this school year. Cuomo and other state officials — several of whom support changing the layoff system generally — counter that abandoning seniority-based layoffs must wait until the state has a better system it can use instead.

Yesterday, Cuomo introduced a bill that would speed implementation of the teacher evaluation bill that Albany passed last May up by a year but did not propose any changes to the layoff system. City officials immediately blasted the bill as “a sham” and a distraction, and Bloomberg said today the governor’s proposal “simply kicks the can down the road.”

Part of the disagreement lies in whether or not the city and the state have time to kick that can. City officials speak of the need to change the layoff system with a sense of urgency, arguing that a budget crisis necessitates laying off more than 4,000 teachers this year. (more…)

Mayor Bloomberg’s fight against “last-in, first-out” layoff rules— the policy of laying off teachers by reverse seniority — has made its way to Albany.

Last night, State Senator John Flanagan introduced a bill that would end the practice and the same bill will be introduced in the Assembly by New York City Assemblyman Jonathan Bing.

The bill rules out seniority as the sole factor in determining who gets laid off. To replace the current seniority system, the bill offers eight pages of an extraordinarily complicated, prioritized list of which teachers and school supervisors would be first in line to be laid off.

Bing’s Chief of Staff Jake Dilemani said the bill was written with input from the mayor’s office, along with groups like Educators 4 Excellence — an organization of teachers who, with funding from the Gates Foundation, has put forward its own proposal to change teacher layoffs.

In a statement sent to reporters, United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said that the bill would “send us back to the days before civil service protections, when people could be fired for being the wrong race or gender, too young or too old.” (more…)

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said today that his threats to cut more than 6,100 teaching positions — including over 4,600 through layoffs — should be taken more seriously than ever before, and the city will have to fight to avoid even more cuts across city agencies.

Governor Andrew Cuomo’s proposed state budget reduces state aid to New York City schools by $1.4 billion, and the city schools system is also facing the end of $850 million in federal stimulus funds. To negate those cuts, the city has moved $1.86 billion in city funds to the Department of Education since June, Bloomberg said today.

But overall city expenses are still rising enough to necessitate the cuts in teaching positions, which were originally projected in the city’s preliminary budget outlined in November, the mayor argued.

Teachers union President Michael Mulgrew said that the mayor’s layoff proposal was “more and more bizarre,” given the increase in city revenue going to fill in gaps in DOE funding and the Cuomo administration’s claims that state cuts should not mean local layoffs.

“We’ve already lost nearly 5,000 teachers to attrition in the last two years, and class sizes are skyrocketing across the city,” Mulgrew said. “It’s time the Mayor joined us in fighting for the children of our city by supporting the extension of the state millionaire’s tax, rather than continuing to focus, as he and Chancellor Black did in Albany this week, on a bogus strategy to lay teachers off.” (more…)