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Education coalition presses on in drive to restore city funding for schools
May 22, 2008 10:15 AM
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District 28 educators try to get motorists to honk their horns to show their displeasure with the education budget cuts at their “Beep on the Boulevard” event on May 13.
May has been a hectic month for the Keep the Promises Coalition as it focuses on getting the city to do what Albany did in April when the Legislature restored proposed cuts in school funding.
Coalition leaders, including UFT President Randi Weingarten, principals union President Ernest Logan and many parent and community groups, view the more than $600 million state restoration — fulfilling the promise made as part of the resolution of the 13-year Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit — as the first giant step in the coalition’s battle to get the Bloomberg administration to keep its promises, too.
What the group demands: restoring $450 million cut from the mayor’s executive budget proposal for the coming fiscal year. It’s backing its demands with demonstrations, school actions, town hall meetings, City Hall press conferences, lobbying, radio and television ads, and a second round of support from Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Education Committee Chair Catherine Nolan and many of their colleagues.
The coalition, comprising more than 40 organizations, held a press conference at City Hall on May 6 [see page 3 for details] calling for a hearing to examine how the DOE actually spends the Contract for Excellence money (part of the CFE funding) it gets from the state. In return for the extra funding, the city is obligated to provide smaller classes and other services to students, but coalition leaders doubt the Albany dollars reach their intended targets.
A May 16 City Hall press conference in a pouring rain saw Silver announce the introduction of an Assembly resolution urging Bloomberg and the City Council to “restore a $180 million midyear budget cut for the 2007-08 school year and to maintain funding to the Department of Education for the 2008-09 school year, as originally committed in the New York City budget for fiscal year 2008.”
The staff at PS 129, Queens, is well-armed for an early-morning May 15 demonstration.
The Legislature had long faulted previous New York mayors for cutting city school funding even as Albany was increasing its share, but until this year the Bloomberg administration had maintained its contribution and Silver insisted that the mayor continue this policy.
Looking at the broad support the coalition has attracted for stopping the cuts, Ernesto Maldonado of the Coalition for Educational Justice said he thought the tide was turning. “There’s a revolution going on. People who never got together are getting together for the children,” he said. “We want to make it possible for children not to go to Sing Sing but to Yale and Harvard.”
The coalition is also running radio and television ads. The TV ad shows needed classroom supplies winking out of existence, and urges city residents to call 1-800-961-6198 and “tell the mayor and City Council to keep their promise and fund our schools.”
UFT members and others are faxing their budget concerns to the mayor and their Council members.
Numerous grassroots Keep the Promises actions are bringing that message home, too.
Nadine Reis, a teacher at PS 1 in Brooklyn, hands a flier to a passer-by as she joins leafletters at Brooklyn Borough Hall on May 7.
Among them was a May 12 Staten Island protest meeting featuring hundreds of angry parents and educators joining with the borough’s three Council members at PS 36 to demand full restoration of DOE cuts [see story on page 35].
In Queens, every Wednesday in May is “Wear Red Day,” and Brooklyn educators are sponsoring 311 Call-In Days.
A full calendar of Keep the Promises events as well as a photo gallery of school actions appears in the Action Alert! section of the UFT Web site, www.uft.org.
Teachers and parents are unified in their anger over cuts as they protest on May 6 outside the Leadership Institute in the Bronx.
All these were a prelude to what Weingarten called at the May 15 Delegate Assembly the beginning of “a permanent coalition of many of the advocacy groups,” including “adults who work in schools and parents and community groups who care about kids … so we’re always out there as advocates for children.” She said working together as a permanent body today would be in stark contrast to the 1960s, when “there was a rupture between communities of color and the teachers union, and we got fractured and got played against each other.” Not this time, she said.
Beside the UFT, CEJ and the principals union, the coalition includes the Campaign for Fiscal Equity; the New York Immigration Coalition; ACORN; the Hispanic Federation of New York State; Advocates for Children; UNITE HERE; SEIU Local 32-BJ; NAACP Metropolitan Council; Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund; Make the Road by Walking New York; Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition; and some 50 others.
