UFT wins on cellphones, class size
The new state budget legislation includes two union priorities — a cellphone ban in schools and funding earmarked for class size reduction — but UFT President Michael Mulgrew said the state’s revised funding formula used to calculate school aid hurt the city’s public schools and must be changed.
New York became the largest state to prohibit cellphone use during the school day. “A bell-to-bell ban is the right move for students, educators and our school communities,” Mulgrew said. “This approach means individual classroom teachers are not responsible for enforcing the new policy.”
The union will work with the city Department of Education to ensure procedures are in place by September to collect phones at the start of the day and return them to students at dismissal.
School officials said the DOE will cover the costs associated with the cellphone ban, but Mulgrew wants to make sure the funds come from the DOE’s central budget, not from individual school budgets.
The $254 billion budget, which was adopted more than five weeks after the April 1 start of the new fiscal year, provided a 5.4% increase in state Foundation Aid for New York City in the 2025-26 fiscal year.
That figure includes $241 million to lower class sizes, according to UFT calculations, an investment that will help fund the hiring of 3,700 additional educators needed to implement the next phase of the class size law in September. That money is in addition to the $150 million that Mayor Eric Adams allocated in his proposed city budget for the fiscal year that begins on July 1.
The governor incorporated some recommendations of a panel that studied how to update the state’s 18-year-old school funding formula, such as using the updated U.S. Census-based poverty rate, but Mulgrew said the new formula does not reflect the poverty level and diverse needs of New York City public school students.
Census data placed New York City’s poverty rate at 23.4%, down from 33.55%, which means the city is receiving about $314 million less in state aid than it would have under the old formula. According to the state’s own Economic Need Index, more than 75% of New York City students are economically disadvantaged.
“Necessary reforms that we and other advocates called for were not included,” Mulgrew said. “Governor Hochul and the leadership in both houses owe it to our city’s children to revise the funding formula to address obvious inequities.”