Classrooms will suffer $303M cut

Just days before their July 1 city budget deadline, the mayor and the City Council settled on a fiscal year 2011 budget plan that cut overall spending by $1 billion.

Teacher’s Choice, which was initially slated for elimination, was preserved thanks to UFT efforts, although at a lower rate than last year. Also, city classrooms will be cut $303 million, about $300 million less than was feared in the spring.

The state Legislature on Aug. 3 finally completed the state budget. State aid to city schools was cut by nearly $400 million.

In the city budget, savings came from removing more than $900 million reserved from Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s original spending plan for teacher salary raises of 4 percent.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew immediately noted that the union and the city have not reached an agreement on freezing teacher pay.

“The mayor ... does not have the power to unilaterally decide on the teachers’ contract,” he said.

The budget removes some but not all of the cuts the mayor had predicted he would need to impose on schools and other city agencies.

While the mayor had threatened to furlough 4,400 teachers, no pedagogues were laid off. Instead the Department of Education expects to lose some 2,000 positions through attrition.

Other city agencies were less fortunate, with library openings scaled back from six to five days per week, HIV and AIDS case workers furloughed and some senior care and child day care centers shuttered.

School nurse positions funded through the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene will be downsized, affecting some 33,000 students in public, private and parochial schools.

The much-vaunted saving of 20 neighborhood fire stations will come at the expense of shrinking engine company manning crews.

Although the state made contingency plans in its budget in the event needed federal aid wasn’t provided, they won’t be needed since Congress on Aug. 4 approved $2.6 billion in aid to the state. The measure will provide New York with $607 million for education, which should prevent about 7,100 teachers statewide from losing their jobs.

Mulgrew and the mayor went to Washington earlier this summer to stress to Congress the importance of the support. In his press release, Bloomberg credited Mulgrew for his effort in the fight.