UFT 2025 state legislative priorities
State priorities one-pager
View the UFT's state legislative priorities for 2025.
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Budget - Foundation Aid
With the incoming federal administration threatening to cut funding to our highest-need students, the UFT stands ready to work with the New York State Legislature to protect our students and school communities.
Protecting our students includes fixing the Foundation Aid formula to ensure high-need schools get the necessary resources.
The UFT supports the following updates:
- Include earmarked funds in the Foundation Aid formula for the implementation of the class size law in New York City.
- Add weights to increase funding for the full range of high-need students, including those in poverty, temporary housing, foster care, all types of special education, and English language learners.
- Update the formula to account for variations by region in the cost of education including inflation, housing costs, and teacher salaries.
Budget - New Revenue
We stand with NYSUT and other unions in saying this year’s budget must find new sources of revenue to address New York’s growing affordability crisis while maintaining the quality of its public services.
What we’re asking:
- Increase New York’s top tax rates for those earning over $5 million and over $25 million by 0.5%.
- Increase the corporate tax rate by 1.75% and make these changes permanent.
These are not new proposals. In fact, the NYS Senate and Assembly proposed these very reforms in each of their one-house budgets last year.
These small reforms would generate up to $3 billion for the state to invest in education, workforce development, childcare, transportation, and housing.
Invest in the Education and Healthcare Workforce
New York City and State are facing potentially crippling staffing shortages in healthcare and education.
New York estimates it will need 180,000 teachers over the next decade; almost 40,000 more nurses by 2030; and New York City was short over 1,400 paraprofessionals, educators who work with the most vulnerable students, this school year. We need to create a comprehensive strategy to address these shortages.
Investing in Career and Technical Education is one way to address the crisis.
What we’re asking:
- Increase the $3,900/pupil funding cap in the Special Services Aid.
- Expand funding to allow 9th-grade students to participate.
- Create clear career advancement pathways for LPNs to obtain their master’s degree, to build a pathway to high school nursing programs.
- Incentivize colleges and industries to provide hands-on CTE experiences for high schoolers.
- Support a recruitment and retention campaign in partnership with the state to promote teaching and nursing as desirable careers.
Create access to a career ladder for current workers.
What we’re asking:
- Increase the starting salaries of our lowest salaried workers.
- Provide and/or promote financial incentives for qualified candidates to become paraprofessionals, teachers, and orderlies.
- Create tuition-free master’s degree programs CUNY and SUNY in education and nursing.
- Support Gov. Hochul’s proposal to cover the tuition for those who enroll in associate degree programs in nursing, teaching, technology and other fields.
Fix Tier 6
Keeping talented educators in the classroom and recruiting new educators into the profession is more important than ever.
What we’re asking:
- Build on previous work to allow Tier 6 members to be able to retire at age 55, after 30 years of service, without reductions.
Nurses
NYU Langone Hospital–Brooklyn and hospitals across the state are refusing to abide by the safe staffing legislation that the Federation of Nurses/UFT and other unions fought so hard to enact. The Federation of Nurses/UFT represents 16,000 nurses across New York State.
What we're asking:
- Enforce the safe staffing laws at NYU Langone Hospital–Brooklyn and hospitals across the state.
- Support nurses negotiating with private hospitals.
- Support transparency surrounding the attrition and vacancy rates of nurses.
- Support adequate training for the newest nurses and place them in lower-intensity units for their first year of work.
- Support preventative mental health care for nurses.
UFT Teacher Center
The UFT Teacher Center accelerates learning and empowers educators through embedded professional development tailored to each school’s unique needs. The number of school-based sites has increased to 208 sites today from 115 sites in the 2020–21 school year.
✓ 208 Teacher Centers embedded in schools across NYC in 2024-25
✓ 317,597 participants – educators, principals, and parents – attended Teacher Center seminars in 2023-24
✓ 128,861 hours of transformative professional development in 2023-24
What we're asking:
- Fund Teacher Centers statewide at $40M.
United Community Schools
United Community Schools (UCS) is a teacher-inspired nonprofit improving outcomes for over 19,000 families at the 39 community schools it operates across NYC and Albany.
✓ Higher test scores
✓ Better attendance
✓ More credits earned
✓ Increased sense of safety
✓ 6:1 return on investment
✓ 25,000+ health and wellness visits coordinated
What we're asking:
- $4M grant to sustain our network of community schools.
- $5M allocation to UCS to provide statewide technical assistance and support.
Charter Schools
Charter schools continue to take up space that public schools need to serve their students and to comply with the class size law. Charters also lack financial transparency, fail our most vulnerable students and openly exploit loopholes for financial gain.
What we're asking:
- Stop using public funds to pay for private facility space rented by charters (S423).
- End the state requirement that the district offer space in public school buildings to charters when that space is needed to lower class sizes.
- Limit charter school grade level expansions (S527).
- Make the Board of Regents the sole authorizer in the state (S77).
- Pass the Charter School Transparency and Accountability Act (S4466/A4458 of 2024).
Child care
Our union membership includes 6,000 home-based child care providers.
What we're asking:
- Support the Governor’s proposal for the $110 million Child Care Construction Fund and the creation of a substitute pool.
- Transition to a cost estimation model—and away from the market rate model—to provide funds to childcare providers based on the true cost of care.
- Pay for enrollment instead of attendance.
- Increase differential payment rate for homeless and nontraditional hours of care (S4079/A1734 of 2024).
- Continue to support and fund the Facilitated Enrollment Child Care Project.
Cell Phones
New York City educators support a statewide ban on student cell phones provided four key safeguards are part of any new policy.
What we’re asking:
- Educators are not the first or sole line of enforcement.
- School districts pay for the cost, not individual schools.
- Enforcement is consistent, fair, and uniform.
- Schools have emergency contact lines set up for parents.
Housing
New York’s leaders cannot afford to go another year without taking action on our state’s housing crisis. Students and their families and educators all face steep rent increases, evictions, and no affordable home ownership opportunities.
What we're asking:
- Strengthen tenant protections.
- Fund the Housing Access Voucher Program.
- Create new workforce housing in the public sector—a Mitchell Lama program for the 21st century