Check out your school's budget cuts here!

Please attend the budget hearings tomorrow morning (Tuesday, May 27), when the Chancellor is due to appear before the Council at City Hall to testify about his proposed cuts to our schools . Keep the Promises Coalition and Class Size Matters need enough parents to fill the room at 9:30 AM when the Council hearings begin; then we plan to march to Tweed at noon. Public testimony starts at 4 PM.

There will also be a rally/press conference on Wed. May 28 at 1 PM – around the time of the stated Council meeting.

A list (in excel) with the amount of cuts for every school and expected final budget (if DOE gets its way) is posted here. The amounts range from slashing 6.2% for the American Sign Language school (!!) and the Professional Performing Arts HS, to cuts of 1.4% for about 700 schools. The rationale for how these reductions were distributed has not been offered by DOE; moreover, there’s no need for any school to suffer cuts next year, given nearly $600 million more in state dollars and a projected city surplus of more than $4 billion.

Chancellor Klein has said that if only the state had let him have more “flexibility” with the Contract for excellence funding, he could cut all school budgets more “equitably” at 1.4%; but that makes no sense either – since averaged out, the amount would have to lie somewhere between 1.4% and 6.2%.

For the egregious way in which the administration appears to be trying to pit parents against each other (so far unsuccessfully), see the NY Times and CBS news.

More disinformation from the city on the budget cuts

According to today’s Daily News, the Bloomberg administration is arguing in Albany that the Assembly’s proposal to erase the Governor’s cuts to education but also to require the city to refrain from making its own cuts would instead force even more draconian reductions than currently planned to other essential city services, like policing and sanitation.

This argument flies in the face of at least three realities:

1- There is no city deficit that necessitates any cuts. In fact, surpluses in the city’s budget are expected until at least 2010 – according to the Independent Budget Office’s analysis here.

2- At the same time the administration is proclaiming that declining revenue obligates them to make these cuts, they are also insisting on reinstituting property tax cuts and rebates amounting to $1.25 billion – more than enough to fulfill the city’s promise made last year to increase funding for our schools.

3- Education is the only area that the state’s highest court deemed so underfunded as to deprive our children of their constitutional rights – and the administration’s promise last year to increase education spending over four years that now Bloomberg wants to renege on was made to address these illegal deficiencies.

Thanks to Pigs and Fishes Art Services for the inspired visual.