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School budgets will be cut — but still unclear how much
Nov 26, 2009 2:59 PM
With state midyear cuts up in the air as Gov. David Paterson and state lawmakers remained locked in disagreement over a deficit-reduction plan, the outlook for school budgets remains murky. City schools are in line for a smaller midyear hit from the city budget ax than previously predicted, but large deficits — and big fights — loom on the horizon.
Staring down a $4.1 billion sinkhole in next year’s budget, Mayor Bloomberg on Nov. 16 ordered $550 million in city agency cuts by next July, and an additional $1.2 billion in the year after that. The Department of Education was asked to cut 1.5 percent this year and 4 percent in 2011. Most other city agencies face cuts of more than twice that size. Agency heads have until Dec. 3 to produce the lists of cuts, which the City Council must vote on in January.
“We all know that at this point, after seven times of reducing the budget, it’s fundamentally salaries and personnel benefits that’s left,” said the mayor at a press conference in Central Park. “Does it mean layoffs? I hope not, but we’ll just see how cooperative everyone will be.”
The “everyone” was a reference to city unions, including the UFT.
Bloomberg noted that personnel costs, including payroll and benefits, account for 78 percent of city expenditures. In a budget maneuver that critics said tacitly encouraged job cuts, City Hall added the cost of fringe benefits, such as employee health care and Social Security contributions, to the agencies’ individual budgets even though the agencies do not pick up those costs.
While acknowledging the city’s need to reduce costs, UFT President Michael Mulgrew told the Nov. 18 Delegate Assembly that “direct services to the classroom must remain whole.”
Mulgrew pointed to the myriad contracts entered into by Chancellor Klein as a ripe source of alternative budget savings.
Layoffs have already hit 530 school aides, whose positions were cut as principals sliced 4.9 percent from their school budgets this fall.
The UFT delegate body on Nov. 19 passed overwhelmingly a resolution to coordinate efforts with AFSCME District Council 37, which represents the aides, to fight their dismissal.
UFT Vice President Karen Alford, who motivated the resolution, contrasted the $120 million in outside contracts that the DOE had entered into over the past three months with the $13.4 million that the DOE saved by terminating the aides, who earn $20,000 a year.
“Our school aides are community members,” Alford said. “They live where they work. They contribute to school safety by greeting children arriving on buses and seeing them home.”
Alford warned that administrators would likely try to get teachers to pick up the slack by making unilateral changes in Circular 6R assignments without discussing it with chapter leaders. That, she said, would be a violation of the contract. It is one thing if a teacher agrees to a principal’s request to do lunch duty and quite another to require it, she said.
Meanwhile, in Albany, Paterson continued to pursue his deficit-reduction plan to address a $3.2 billion shortfall for the remaining four and a half months of this fiscal year. His plan calls for a $223 million midyear cut to city schools.
Paterson called the Legislature back into session in midNovember to deal with the state’s empty purse, but as the newspaper went to press, no agreement with Democratic leaders in the Assembly and the Senate had been reached.
Albany faces even larger deficits in the next two fiscal years, after the expiration of a temporary tax increase on the wealthy in the coming year and the end of federal stimulus financing in the following year.
