Lawsuit filed by UFT to block Mayor's budget cuts to education

Yesterday, a lawsuit was filed by the UFT, stating that the Mayor's proposed cuts to education violate two state laws -  the Contracts for Excellence law, which specifically says additional state funds awarded under the program must be "used to supplement, and not supplant funds allocated by the district." And yet these cuts have been imposed despite the DOE receiving an additional $500 million this year in C4E funds - the third phase in of more than $1.3 billion over the last three years, meant to be invested in improving  classroom conditions including lowering class sizes. Instead, class sizes have increased the last two years. Class Size Matters and AQE cited this issue in our letter to the State, pointing out this supplanting and urging them to require DOE to come up with a corrective action plan on class size. 

The other state law these cuts appear to violate is Education Law § 2576, which mandates that the city cannot cut spending on K12 education compared to the prior year, unless the city has suffered an overall decline in revenue, which has not occurred.  In  fact, the city anticipates an even higher surplus this year than last. 

The UFT press release is below, along with two charts shown at the press conference. The first is self-explanatory, but the second chart entitled "Education City Funds as Percentage of Overall City Budget Funds" is a bit confusing.  I was told by a UFT staffer that this chart shows how NYC spending on education has declined as a percentage of its overall spending on all city agencies.  Newsclips about the lawsuit at Chalkbeat, Daily News, NY Post, NBC News and elsewhere.

Teachers Sue to Halt Adams Budget Cuts to Education

 

The United Federation of Teachers, joined by individual teachers, today filed suit in Manhattan State Supreme Court to stop the Adams administration from cutting as much as $2 billion from city schools.

 

The lawsuit charges that as the state increased education funding to the city's public schools, New York City illegal reduced its contribution to education.

These cuts came, according to the lawsuit, "at a time when the City collected nearly $8 billion more in revenue last fiscal year than was anticipated, and when the City’s reserves of over $8 billion are at a new record high.”

 

In November the Adams administration announced cuts of nearly $550 million in the current fiscal year and plans for further reductions that could amount to $2 billion.  The cuts announced in November have already affected the universal pre-K initiative, current after-school and planned summer school programs, along with computer science instruction, special education, and other services.    

 

The legal filing says that the administration's claim that dealing with asylum seekers sill cost $11 billion over the next two years is "an unverified estimate."  That cost estimate has been challenged by lower projections from both the city's Independent Budget Office and the City Comptroller.

 

Describing the administration’s statements of a fiscal crisis resulting from the asylum seekers as “a false narrative,” the lawsuit says “the law does not permit school funding to be used as a political bargaining chip; and cutting essential services to the City’s schools is not a substitute for the mayoral leadership and advocacy on behalf of New Yorkers needed to obtain federal and state support."

 

UFT President Michael Mulgrew said, “The administration can’t go around touting the tourism recovery and the return of the city’s pre-pandemic jobs, and then create a fiscal crisis and cut education because of its own mismanagement of the asylum seeker problem.  Our schools and our families deserve better.”

 

The lawsuit cites two provisions of state law:  a requirement known as “maintenance of effort” that is part of Albany’s mayoral control legislation for New York City schools; and provisions of the state’s “Contract for Excellence” program.

 

According to the lawsuit, the maintenance of effort provision “prohibits the City from reducing spending in its schools from the level provided in the preceding year unless overall City revenues decline.”

 

The city’s contribution to the education budget for fiscal year 2023 was $14.5 billion, while the adopted budget for fiscal year 2024 was reduced to $14.1 billion. By January, further cuts under the Mayor’s plan will reduce the city’s contribution in FY2024 to $13.9 billion. City revenues – not counting state and federal aid -- grew $5 billion last year.

 

Under the state’s Contract for Excellence, local school districts must use new state funds to supplement local spending for education, but not to replace local efforts.  The lawsuit claims that the administration’s budget cuts will mean that state funds will end up supporting city education programs, in effect supplanting with state funds the programs that the city has refused to pay for.

 

According to the lawsuit, the cuts also undermine students’ rights to “a sound basic education” as provided for under New York State’s constitution. 

 

The lawsuit asks the court to find that the Mayor’s recent and planned budget cuts violate the New York State Constitution and state law and order the administration to restore education funding to the $14.5 billion amount that the city appropriated in fiscal year 2023.

 

A copy of the lawsuit is available here: https://files.uft.org/mulgrew-v-cityofny.pdf

 

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Council Members Dromm and Treyger urge Congress to make sure while funding schools, NYS and NYC can't pull back their support at the same time

See the letter below, sent late last week from Council Members Danny Dromm and Mark Treyger, chairs of the Council Finance and Education Committees to New York Senators and our Congressional delegation, urging them to provide the additional funding our schools will need next fall to reopen safely and well, with the enhanced in-person support that students will require to recover from the huge losses they've suffered this year.

The letter also points out that the federal aid should be structured so that the state cannot simply cut education funding in the same amount as the additional aid districts receive from the federal government, as Governor Cuomo did last year with his "pandemic adjustment", cutting NYC's aid by nearly a billion dollars.

 As the Education Law Center and AQE point out in a new analysis, Cuomo threatened to do this again in his new Executive Budget, by slashing state aid by over half of the $3.85 billion in federal emergency relief funds in the previous funding passed by Congress, the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations (CRRSA) Act, funding that was meant to respond to the ongoing impacts of COVID-19, not to plug holes in state education budgets. 

At the same time, CM Dromm and CM Treyger also urged the Congress to make sure the city doesn't use these funds by withdrawing its support for schools as well:

" At the same time, include rigorous maintenance of effort provisions in the law, so that the city does not cut back on its own funding, as it is threatening to do with significant cuts to the budgets of as many as 60 percent of schools. This happened previously during the last economic recession in 2007, when during the first two years of the recession, even as the state and the federal government increased aid to schools, the class sizes of NYC students increased sharply, because the city cut its own funding at the same time. Sadly, class sizes in our public schools still remain significantly larger than before 2007, particularly in the early grades."

According to Education Week, the Biden plan does contain certain restrictions to ensure maintenance of effort on the part of states and districts, particularly in relation to their aid to high-poverty districts like NYC: 

States receiving aid through the bill released Monday would have to agree not to cut their per-pupil spending for high-poverty districts more than any per-pupil reduction they make for districts overall, during fiscal 2022 and fiscal 2023....In addition, states could not cut their own aid to the 20 percent of districts with the highest share of economically disadvantaged students from fiscal 2019 funding levels. That requirement would also cover fiscal 2022 and fiscal 2023.

There would be similar conditions for districts’ limits on how much they could cut aid to high-poverty schools.

States would also have to agree to maintain certain levels of spending on K-12 schools in general in proportion to recent years’ spending levels, although they could apply for a waiver from that requirement.

Let's hope that these provisions stick and are strong and meaningful, given the propensity on the part of the city and state to take advantage of funds coming from elsewhere to pull back on their own support to public schools.