Feb 28, 2008 11:55 AM
March 19. That’s when the UFT joins its fired-up allies in the education community in hosting a rally opposing current and future cuts in education funding. The groups want both city and state elected officials to keep their promises to our schoolchildren.
The united effort, dubbed the “Keep the Promises Coalition,” comprises more than 60 community and education groups and parent organizations as well as several labor unions, including the principals union, and 50 elected officials. The coalition is organizing to flood the streets around City Hall. Its message is three-fold: reverse the city’s budget cuts to schools; restore the full funding increase that the state promised for smaller classes and other key reforms; and maintain school building aid.
The city imposed a $180 million midyear cut, $100 million of which it took directly from the schools’ budgets. Following that 1.75 percent midyear budget cut, schools took an immediate hit, ranging from $9,000 to more than $400,000 at some of the larger high schools, forcing schools to eliminate or scale back important education programs and services.
Meanwhile, the $80 million cut that was supposed to come from DOE headquarters is, in actuality, only a $15 million cut. Most of the DOE’s “cuts” were recalculations of what things actually cost.
Next year is even worse: the city plans to cut another $324 million from next year’s Department of Education budget.
Gov. Eliot Spitzer last year promised a $528 million increase in basic state operating aid to city schools this year as part of the resolution of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity school aid lawsuit. But with uncertain economic times ahead, the governor recently proposed giving New York City schools $193 million less than expected in Contract for Excellence funds. These Contract for Excellence dollars were earmarked to reduce class size, improve middle schools and English language learner instruction and other proven educational reforms.
“We are calling on every stakeholder of public education to turn out for the rally,” UFT President Randi Weingarten said. “Even in uncertain economic times, we need to keep our promises to kids.”
“These cuts do harm to the valuable extras that make schools work and help give children a love of learning: from remediation, enrichment, class trips and Regents prep programs, parent outreach and translation services to extracurricular activities like teams, the school newspaper, chess club or the orchestra,” Weingarten added.
Weingarten said the decrease in promised state aid will stall the drive for smaller classes by hamstringing the Contract for Excellence. “The Contract for Excellence is the only real accountability mechanism we have to ensure funds go to reduce class sizes,” she noted.
School programs are already starting to shrink or disappear as a result of the midyear city budget cut, UFT chapter leaders say. Results from 374 schools of an ongoing online poll of UFT chapter leaders show that 127 schools eliminated some or all of this year’s after-school and weekend programs, while 123 schools saw reductions in instructional supplies. Among other cuts, 21 schools consolidated classes while 61 cut back on the use of subs. Eighty-eight schools reduced professional development and six lost SAVE rooms.
All schools, from those with world-class reputations to those most in need of extra help, were affected.
Paula Washington, chapter leader at Fiorello LaGuardia HS for the Performing Arts and Music and Art, said cuts to her school “make me feel like we’ve been raped and pillaged.” The school’s elaborate annual musical is now history. Eliminating the musical affects not just the school’s outreach program but training for the pit orchestra and those in technical theater, she said. “And the drama festival is at risk, too. It hinges on after-school rehearsals” she said. Per-session pay is also threatened. Worst of all, she said, “this school offers a dual major and a longer day. It will be impossible to do everything on a regular day schedule.”
Washington, a violist and herself a graduate of one of the two LaGuardia predecessors, characterized both teachers’ and administrators’ responses as “a combination of fear, disgust and anger.” When the school principal, a sometime adversary of the outspoken chapter leader, told her how devastated she felt that the cuts were done without any input from her, Washington told her, “Now you know how we feel.”
The across-the-board cuts don’t discriminate between schools in relatively decent shape and those struggling to improve. That seemingly equitable approach unfairly punishes struggling schools, said Donna Coppolla, chapter leader at Staten Island’s PS 14. The $70,000 that her school lost in the mid-year cuts is just the latest beating that the school has taken. It comes on top of the state’s rescinding of a major grant because of an uptick in safety problems at the school, though Coppolla insists that the school is safe and teachers do not fear working there.
“Instead of helping us, they took money away from us,” Coppolla said. “The new cuts mean all the supplies are gone, along with workbooks for kindergarten and 1st-grade tutoring. It’s not even fair, because schools aren’t equal.”
CTE schools are taking it on the chin, too. “Our kids have choices: They can join the chess club, the dance club, the drama club or they can join the Crips and the Bloods,” Zipora Steiner, principal of Brooklyn’s William H. Maxwell Career and Technical Education HS in East New York told the Daily News (Feb. 15) about the real cost of her school’s $114,000 in cuts.
A DOE spokeswoman told the News, “Those types of comments aren’t helpful.”