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Mayor doesn’t keep his word on education funding
May 8, 2008 1:05 PM
Cuts $450M from schools despite last year’s promise, budget surplus
UFT President Randi Weingarten speaks out against the cuts while students, parents and educators cheer at at May 1 rally at the Bronx County Courthouse.
The headlines reporting the mayor’s stripped-down May 1 executive budget, including some $450 million in cuts to education, could have read: “Bloomberg to schools: You are not the priority anymore.”
The mayor signed off just one year ago on a $5.4 billion, four-year state and city increase in school spending as part of an agreement resolving the 13-year Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit. Now he says that he can’t keep his word. And that is with a huge budget surplus ($4.59 billion to $6 billion depending on who is counting). UFT President Randi Weingarten said the mayor’s cut of what was promised “is not belt-tightening; it is a matter of priorities.”
In contrast, the state, despite a shaky economy and a serious state budget shortfall, proved in April that it has different priorities. Initial plans by former Governor Eliot Spitzer to reduce state aid to schools and cut other spending items were scrapped by the new governor and the legislature, who instead added $600 million for the city schools.
The CFE agreement had obligated the state for $3.2 billion and the city for $2.2 billion more for city schools by 2011. The money provided what school advocates say is the minimum city and state students need to get the constitutionally mandated “sound, basic education.” Not so the mayor, who said declining Wall Street profits and projected multi-billion-dollar budget deficits in future years forced his hand.
Bloomberg wants to keep the budget at $59.1 million, which in inflation-adjusted dollars makes it virtually the same as this year’s spending.
Said the mayor in response to why he was pushing an austerity budget given a mammoth surplus, “Everyone has a different view of whether we have a surplus or not … Anyone who says we have a surplus in ’09 either doesn’t understand or is being duplicitous.”
Despite his talk of austerity, Bloomberg recommended continuing the $400 property tax rebate and, for at least one more year, the 7 percent property tax rate reduction. Weingarten commented that she understood the importance of the mayor’s “keep[ing] his $400 promise to homeowners and roll[ing over] some of the surplus as a cushion. He should have given the same consideration to the importance of the city’s promise to our children.”
Despite having the largest budget surplus ever, Bloomberg projected the city will have deficits of $1.3 billion in FY 2010, which begins July 1, 2009 and $4.6 billion in FY 2011. Surprisingly, Bloomberg also said, despite how the budget documents read, that he was actually adding $200 million to the school budget.
Among the mayor’s cuts to the DOE budget, he proposed eliminating the funds the City Council added last year for such initiatives as Teacher’s Choice, workstations and computers for teacher use and Dial-A-Teacher. The new proposed cuts come on top of $180 million in mid-year budget reductions, most of which the chancellor directed to the schools.
Opposition to the school cuts is mounting. Just a day before the budget’s formal release, a who’s who of the City Council held a news conference on City Hall steps to support a resolution by Brooklyn Councilman Bill de Blasio calling on the mayor to restore “proposed cuts to the Department of Education budget. De Blasio, whose bill has 44 cosigners, said “this is not the time to disinvest in our schools,” and “if cuts were needed, look to [cutting] contracting services and not direct services to kids.”
Weingarten added that the state’s finances were far more troubling than were the city’s, and that if the financially strapped state government could do the right thing, so could the better endowed city government. Education Chairman Robert Jackson also asked his colleagues to join him in voting “no” on the entire budget “ if all or most of the funding is not restored.”
The same day that the budget was announced, the “Keep the Promises” Coalition, which includes dozens of citywide civic, parent and advocacy groups, as well as community groups, the principals union and the UFT joined with Bronx elected officials, parents, teachers and students at a Bronx courthouse rally to denounce Bloomberg’s cuts to education.
Noted Weingarten, “The city cannot break its promises to kids, and we’re going to keep fighting until the city steps up and makes good on those promises.”
The Coalition is also planning other rallies and street actions, literature distribution, lobbying and advertising. The UFT is stepping up actions at schools and lobbying council members, borrowing from a model already developing in the Bronx. At PS 32, some 35 staffers leafleted colleagues and parents in the rain, while at MS/HS 141 a similar event featured area Councilman Oliver Koppell.
