The UFT is focusing its efforts on winning the restoration of Teacher’s Choice funding as final negotiations on next year’s city budget get underway.

UFT Vice President Richard Mantell, in his testimony for a City Council budget hearing on June 9, cited examples of teachers spending out of their own pockets for everything from pencils to batteries to caterpillars to help their students and enrich their lessons.

Anthony Valentin at Stuyvesant HS spends hundreds of dollars on top of his small Teacher’s Choice allotment to buy software, batteries, speakers, cables and other technology to teach social studies, Mantell said in his testimony. Rachel Tully, a 3rd-grade teacher in the Bronx, buys many of her shelter students their pencils, notebooks and folders because they would otherwise lack any school supplies. Charlene Johnson, a pre-K teacher in the East Village, bought caterpillars so her students could see metamorphosis with their own eyes, he said, but she needs more to furnish the dramatic play area.

“New York City public school teachers daily confront resource shortages in our schools that curtail what they are able to achieve,” he told the Council.

Mantell urged the Council to restore Teacher’s Choice to its full, pre-recession level. The current city budget contained $6.1 million in Teacher’s Choice funds; each teacher received only $77.

Next year’s city education budget is on track to be almost $1 billion larger than it was this year. It will include a large boost in full-day pre-kindergarten, millions of dollars in programs for struggling schools and increases to all school operating budgets. A final agreement must be reached by July 1.

As it has taken shape so far, the new $21.8 billion education operating budget will add $114 million for full-day pre-K. It will direct another $34 million next year and $60 million every year after that to 130 Renewal Schools, community schools and schools identified as “persistently failing.” All schools will see their Fair Student Funding “floors,” or minimum amounts, raised.

The budget, if passed, also includes 151 new teacher positions for English language learners and $4 million to create 440 new school sports teams next year.  And the UFT has asked the Council to add $1 million for mental health services in its 24 Community Learning Schools, a top need identified by staffers in those schools.

On the new $13.7 billion capital budget for 2015-2019, Mantell told the Council that the UFT wants the city to add more than the planned number of seats, citing the urgent need to reduce class sizes and ease overcrowding with major investments in new buildings and classrooms. He repeated UFT President Michael Mulgrew’s call to close tax loopholes that allow 90,000 wealthy absentee property owners in the city to dodge their fair share of taxes. And he called for elimination of all 350-plus trailers, or temporary classroom units, outside schools.

The state owes New York City schools $2.5 billion from the Campaign for Fiscal Equity settlement, which the governor refused to include in the state budget for next year.