By THOMAS KAPLAN
Published: February 14, 2011
ALBANY — It is an annual tradition on the day the governor unveils his budget. Flipping page after page of stapled booklets collated by the state’s Education Department, lawmakers search through tiny print for a series of magic numbers.They are looking at how their school districts fared, and even in the rosiest of fiscal years, the ensuing legislative debate about school aid tends to be fierce.
But this year, with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo having put a budgetary bull’s-eye on school districts all across the state, it may be worse than ever.
Much of the anxiety among education groups and teachers’ unions centers on the sheer scale of the cuts that Mr. Cuomo has proposed. But some political fault lines have emerged, too, with Republican state senators from Long Island expressing concern that they are bearing an unfairly large share of the pain.
Mr. Cuomo’s proposed school cuts will be the subject of a joint hearing in Albany on Tuesday, and lawmakers predict it will be a heated session.
While the governor’s cuts to school aid are calculated through what he describes as a progressive formula, education groups say the reductions will still widen the funding gap between wealthier and poorer school districts.
“The governor’s budget hurts school kids across the board, because the cuts are enormous, and they are much larger in poor districts than rich districts,” said Billy Easton, executive director of the Alliance for Quality Education, an advocacy group. Nearly two-thirds of respondents in a Siena College poll released on Monday said they opposed Mr. Cuomo’s school-aid cuts. No other spending reduction in his budget drew as much opposition.
And Mr. Cuomo’s proposal has already raised the specter of a court battle. A coalition of eight education groups argues that his proposed cuts would effectively wipe out funding increases mandated by the settlement of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity’s long-running lawsuit to force the state to give more money to New York City schools. “We really are concerned that after so much work and so much progress, we are turning the clock back,” said Geri D. Palast, the campaign’s executive director.
Aides to Mr. Cuomo are quick to offer their own spreadsheets with school data to rebut critics. They argue that reserves and leftover stimulus money provide a hefty cushion for school districts, and that schools should also seek to save money by curtailing pay for superintendents.
Beginning Tuesday, they plan to emphasize a new argument, focusing on districts’ ability to cut nonclassroom expenditures, like information-technology services, transportation, food services and facilities maintenance. “Cut the fat, build the muscle” is how a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, Josh Vlasto, put it.
Still, the governor’s cuts are a window on how hard it is — even for someone who has declared Albany’s budgeting process a “sham” and vowed to make fundamental changes — to break away from traditional formulas.
Four years ago, Gov. Eliot Spitzer tried to do that by greatly increasing school funding to New York City and other needy districts. But his plan would have upended the longstanding practice of apportioning a fixed slice of new state spending on school aid to Long Island and another fixed slice to the city, with the rest of the state sharing what is left over. (Republicans from Long Island have long held a big voting bloc in the State Senate, providing the political might to preserve the arrangement.)
Mr. Spitzer ultimately won passage of a new formula to hand out school aid, but only after ladling on top extra funding for wealthy school districts that essentially recreated the traditional funding allocations — with about 13 percent of new state school aid going to Long Island and about 39 percent to New York City.
Mr. Cuomo’s budget hews to the same rough portions for the total school-aid budget. But of the total money being cut, about 14.6 percent of it would come out of Long Island, and lawmakers there have criticized the cuts that many of their districts face.
“The point that our members were making was those cuts should be equitable,” said Scott Reif, a spokesman for Senate Republicans.
Long Island takes a bigger hit from Mr. Cuomo’s cuts because the governor’s budget takes into account a school district’s wealth in computing the size of the reduction in state aid.
Mr. Cuomo’s budget reduces year-to-year school aid by 9.4 percent statewide, not including money for school construction. What the Education Department considers “low-need” and “average-need” districts would have their state funding cut by about 14 percent. “High-need” districts would lose about 8 percent, as would New York City.
But poorer districts rely on state funding far more than wealthier ones, so a cut smaller in percentage terms can be far costlier in terms of dollars lost. For instance, the 11 percent decline in total state school aid that Mr. Cuomo has proposed for the affluent community of Roslyn on Long Island equals less than one-half of 1 percent of the school district’s total budget this year.
Places like Elmira and Niagara Falls face only single-digit percentage decreases in state school funding, but that amounts to at least 4 percent of their current budget, because they rely more on state funding.
Not including construction aid, low-need districts will lose an average of $348 in state funding per student, according to state data, versus $811 for average-need districts and $751 for high-need districts. New York City will lose $548, according to the state data.
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