Please help us advocate against the egregious budget cuts planned for schools next year!

Yesterday, Mayor Adams announced his executive budget, and though he added $1.2 billion for various initiatives, including even more funding for the police, he is still planning to cut school budgets by $375 million over the next three years, which combined with unidentified school budget “efficiency savings” of this year, would amount to about $411 million in cuts.  Some of that would be partly made up with federal stimulus funds, but he still plans to cut school budgets by about $225 million next year, increasing to the $375 million the following year.

At the same time, the Mayor is proposing to cut $1.1 billion in new school construction, with a loss of about 11,000 new seats, compared to the capital plan that was adopted last June.  Queens would suffer cuts of over 6,000 seats and Bronx nearly that many.  For more on the proposed seat cuts by district, see our presentation here.

So now we need your help.  Please take the following three steps:

• Call the Mayor at #311 and your Council Member.  You can find your CM phone number by plugging your address at https://council.nyc.gov/districts/   Tell them: “Please do not cut the budget to schools or the capital plan; which would cause class sizes to increase and worse overcrowding.  Instead, provide dedicated funding to further reduce class size and make it more equitable across the city.”

• Then send an email message to the Chancellor by clicking here,  saying the much same thing.

•   Finally, please volunteer to join us in a meeting with your Council Member to urge them to fight these cuts, by filling out the Google form here, or by responding to this message. 

•  Ask your CEC or Community Board to pass a resolution on opposing these cuts; a sample resolution is posted here.

Though the Council has pushed the Mayor to restore many of his proposed cuts, they have not said anything about reversing his devastating cuts to school budgets, which would likely cause the sharpest class size increases since the Great Recession. 

Nor have they said anything about the proposed $1.1 billion in cuts to the capital plan.  The City Council needs to hear from their constituents that they care passionately about this issue.

 Thanks so much for your support and please forward this message to others who care.

Our briefing on class size, overcrowding, student privacy & likely impact of huge proposed cuts to school budgets and new school construction

 Last night we presented information to the Citywide Council on High Schools on class size, overcrowding and the likely impact of the huge proposed cuts to school budgets and the capital plan.  They also wanted a short briefing of the privacy issue, especially as our schools suffered a huge breach of the personal student data accessed by the Skedula/Pupil path program.  Take a look and let us know if you want a briefing on any of these issues for your CEC, Citywide Council  or Community group by emailing us at info@classsizematters.org.  thanks!