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UFT in new budget battle

by Michael Hirsch

Oct 29, 2009 1:46 PM

Mulgrew: Don’t break the promises we have made to kids

A staggering imbalance has opened in New York State’s current year budget, and it threatens to grow in future years. In response, Gov. David Paterson on Oct. 15 called for significant midyear spending cuts across the board, including deep reductions in education spending, a plan that the UFT is fighting.

At a state Senate budget hearing on Oct. 26, UFT President Michael Mulgrew appealed to lawmakers not to break the promises made to give every child in New York City and New York State a quality education.

“We made a promise that every child would have basic literacy skills. We made a promise to close the achievement gap. We made a promise to increase the graduation rate. We made a promise to decrease the dropout rate,” Mulgrew said. “If we go down this road of disinvesting in education and making these midyear cuts, we will be breaking these promises.”

Members in fax blitz

Within 72 hours of the governor’s announcement, union members were already advocating for their schools with 5,000 UFT members sending well over 15,000 faxes to the governor and their local state senator and assembly member, calling on them to protect classrooms from midyear cuts. The faxes flooding the lawmakers’ offices urged them to “step up for our schools, and push hard against these potentially devastating cuts.”

New York City schools have had to absorb $400 million in city budget cuts this September, which has already had an adverse effect on students with reductions in programs, services and personnel.

Last year, Paterson sought to chop $880 million in statewide school aid at budget time and then tried to impose midyear school cuts. Those midyear cuts were forestalled when the governor and legislative leaders could not reach an agreement.

Now, the state is facing at least a $3 billion deficit for the present year ending in March.

That means more reductions in school spending may be on the way, Paterson said, calling this “a time of uncommon difficulty.” In his plan to deal with the state’s ballooning deficit, Paterson called for reducing school aid by $686 million statewide through the end of the June 2010 school year. That equals a school cut of $480 million statewide for the fiscal year that ends three months earlier, in March, including $223.2 million (or 2.6 percent) for New York City’s public schools. Total state spending would be trimmed by $1.8 billion through March.

The governor has ruled out midyear tax increases, a stance that the UFT supports. In addition to cuts to education and health care spending, he would close the budget gap with savings from a new Tier 5 pension tier for state workers, a cap on state spending and cuts in state agencies on top of the hiring freeze that he already imposed. Another $900 million would come from one-shot revenues, a sales tax on currently tax-free cigarettes sold at Indian reservations and a soft-drink sales tax. No layoffs are planned.

The state budget director claimed the cuts were “designed to have the least possible negative economic impact.”

Alternative solutions needed

Mulgrew said everyone must work together to find alternative solutions to help bridge the budget gap.

“First and foremost, we must be smart and creative,” he said. “We must also understand that there will be some tough decisions to be made. Working together, we need to explore ways of increasing revenues through creative legislation and programs that will help the economy grow and increase funding to the schools.”

While recognizing New York’s tight fiscal bind, Mulgrew said classrooms had to be saved from midyear cuts, which would unravel school budgets already in place, disrupt ongoing programs and dislocate staff.

“The children in New York City’s classrooms should not have to bear the brunt of these cuts,” he said.

Promising to work closely with state and city officials on mitigating the effects of the proposed reductions, Mulgrew urged the city DOE to look for savings by “beginning now to review all outside contracts for goods and services starting with the city’s multimillion dollar annual spending on pupil testing and evaluation, which has led to a focus on test prep rather than on real learning.”

Anticipating the gathering storm, Mulgrew joined a Sept. 23 demonstration of teachers and other publicly funded service providers on the City Hall steps to urge that classrooms be protected from the massive midyear cuts that were rumored to be on the way.