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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…)