GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Next school year’s budget cuts will be “devastating,” principals are reporting.

Principals had until Thursday to decide how to handle cuts of about 5 percent or more of their budgets for next year. Many say they chose to cut teaching positions, slash after-school programs, and trim other extras that have helped their schools improve.

For an example, see the comment left on GothamSchools’ interactive budget cuts map over the weekend by the principal of PS/MS 179 in the Bronx:

We lost 13 teachers, one AP through retirement who we cannot afford to replace, four paraprofessionals, three school aides and a family worker. [...] I will have NO special programs that we previously paid for such as poets for middle school, dance for elementary school. Morale is terrible and the results would appear to be devastating — all this after making significant progress over the past three years.

To let us know what’s being cut at your school, leave a comment on our budget cuts map or send us an e-mail.

President Obama might have spoken too soon when he said the federal stimulus could prevent teacher layoffs in New York City. Depending on how state legislators choose to disburse the stimulus funds, the city could still be looking at a loss of 2,000 teachers, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein told members of the City Council’s education committee this morning.

The city Department of Education believes it is entitled to 41 percent of the state’s $2.4 billion in education stimulus funds because it receives 41 percent of state funds overall, Klein said today at the council’s hearing on the DOE’s preliminary budget for the fiscal year that begins on July 1. This formula would give the DOE more than $500 million in stabilization funds, allowing it to avoid teacher layoffs.

But he said some lawmakers “are taking a different view,” instead suggesting that the city should receive a third of the state’s stimulus money for schools because it serves a third of the state’s public school students. Under this scenario, the DOE would receive just $360 million in stabilization funds, and about 2,000 teachers would have to be laid off. Klein, who was in Albany yesterday to lobby for the city schools, declined to identify the lawmakers to reporters after his testimony, saying that the negotiations are internal and ongoing.

Either way, cuts to schools’ non-teaching staff would be severe, Klein said, with a minimum of about 2,500 positions being lost in the first scenario and as many as 25 percent of school-based non-teaching staff positions being eliminated in the second. These positions include school aides, family workers, and other school personnel. (more…)

Add the annual musical at the city’s most selective music and theater school — yes, the one from “Fame” — to the list of potential budget casualties.

Via City Room, here’s what one teacher at the school, Manhattan’s LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, had to say:

Paula Washington, the La Guardia chapter leader of teachers’ union and an alumn[a] of the school, acknowledged that it was a “huge loss,” but said it was hard to fault the decision given the broader budget situation. School officials are bracing for cuts of up to $1.5 billion in the department’s $20 billion budget next year.

“There are often agents in the audience at these performances, so there is a real loss of exposure for students.” said Ms. Washington, who teaches orchestra at the school and lamented the loss of two violin instructors who have yet to be replaced.

“We’re down to the marrow here,” she added. “Forget about cutting to the bone, we’re talking about full level amputations now.

As Elizabeth noted, the city Department of Education could be looking at nearly $600 million in cuts in the next year. With numbers like that on the horizon, it’s easy to forget that less than a month ago, the DOE cut $180 million from this year’s budget. We already learned that the department planned to cut nearly 500 staff positions centrally. But individual schools also had to cut a total of $104 million from their budgets in the middle of the year, long after most principals had completed making spending decisions for most of their funds. How did they do it?

At yesterday’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting in Brooklyn, the DOE’s chief operating officer, Photeine Anagnostopoulos, provided some answers. Here’s what she said schools cut from their budgets:

• $63 million in funds that had not already been earmarked for a specific purpose. Especially after last year, when schools had their budgets cut overnight in the middle of the year, principals planned ahead for having to give back some of their funds by not spending them all right away. November’s cuts wiped out these budget cushions. (more…)

The Department of Education would abandon a program it launched last year to reward schools that earned A’s on their progress reports, under the budget cut proposal Mayor Bloomberg released yesterday. The program was supposed to give $30 per student to schools that earned both an A grade on the progress report and a “well-developed” score on their Quality Review. That money, which entered the school’s general budget, was separate from awards given to principals and teachers in high-performing schools.

But now, as part of a $180 million reduction in DOE spending ordered by the mayor, the $3.4 million earmarked to pay schools this year for their 2007-2008 performance is slated to be slashed from the department’s budget.

When bonuses were awarded for the first time, last January, 134 schools qualified. The number skyrocketed in the reports’ second year, to more than 380 elementary and middle schools. The higher grades followed a wave of higher test scores across New York State. Even more schools could have been awarded bonuses: High school progress reports haven’t yet been released.

As far as I can tell, progress report bonuses are the only element of Chancellor Joel Klein’s accountability initiatives that are already slated for elimination. I’ve posted the mayor’s complete list of proposed budget reductions for the DOE below the jump. Do you see others? (more…)