Lawmakers Push for Fairer School Funding, Higher Aid

New York lawmakers are proposing changes to the state’s school funding formula, including updates to regional labor costs, that could save two dozen districts from losing money for the upcoming school year.

First implemented in 2007, the Foundation Aid formula is outdated. Last year, the state commissioned the Rockefeller Institute to review the formula and make recommendations for how to improve it. The think tank published a comprehensive report in December with a list of suggestions.

In her executive budget released in January, Governor Kathy Hochul proposed adopting two key changes based on recommendations from the Rockefeller report: using more recent and accurate poverty data and replacing free and reduced-lunch data with data of students who are considered economically disadvantaged. She proposes $26.4 billion in Foundation Aid, an increase of $1.5 billion over last year.

The one-house budgets include slight increases over the governor’s proposal: $27 billion for the Assembly and $27.07 billion for the Senate.

Following the release of her budget, Hochul said the proposal is just the first step to fixing the formula.

“We’re going to continue adjusting the formula,” she said. “This is not the end. We’re not finished with it yet.”

But under the governor’s proposed changes, 24 school districts could receive less Foundation Aid funding than without the formula changes, according to a review by the Alliance for Quality Education.

Although those districts will still receive more money than last year, the reduction is still a hindrance to districts who need to plan their budgets ahead of time, according to Marina Marcou-O’Malley, the Alliance’s co-executive director.

“It means they will have less of an increase to work with,” she said. “They won’t be able to do everything that they might have been planning to do.”

New York City public schools would lose nearly $350 million under the governor’s proposed budget.

The formula “does not address the reality of providing a high-quality education today to nearly one million students, especially our most vulnerable populations,” New York City Schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos said in a Joint Legislative Budget Hearing in February.

The New York State Board of Regents and the Rockefeller Institute recommended updating the formula’s Regional Cost Index, which tries to account for local labor costs, along with the poverty data — which is what both the Assembly and Senate budgets aim to do to help correct those budget gaps for the 24 districts.

The Senate proposal would increase the Regional Cost Index for the regions with the highest labor costs — the Hudson Valley and New York City, which includes Long Island.

The Assembly proposal would modify the formula so that it uses the Regional Cost Index from either 2006 or 2024 — whichever is higher. It would also increase funding for multilingual learners.

At the February budget hearing, Jennifer Pyle, the executive director of the Big 5 School Districts, said that the organization’s member districts – Buffalo, New York City, Rochester, Syracuse, Yonkers, Albany, Mount Vernon, and Utica – enroll 67 percent of the state’s English Language Learners. Those districts also have high numbers of students with special needs.

“There are more students that have been classified, and the students who have been classified are requiring much more robust services,” Pyle said.

A coalition of more than 120 groups has asked the state to include additional funding for multilingual students, students in temporary housing, children in foster care and students with disabilities.

One of the governor’s key budget proposals is a push for a universal school meals program that would provide free breakfast and lunch to students across the state. Many students already have access to free meals, but Hochul’s proposal would close the remaining gaps. Both the Assembly and the Senate are including her proposals in their one-house budgets.

Hochul also announced that she would provide free access to community college for students between the ages of 25 and 55 who are pursuing first-time associate degrees in certain fields, including nursing, teaching, and engineering. Both the Assembly and Senate budgets go further to provide free associate degree programs to all CUNY and SUNY students.

Hochul is also pushing to ban the use of cell phones in classrooms, a move that the New York State United Teachers union supports. She set aside $13.5 million in her budget to help schools implement the ban.

In its proposal, the Assembly said it supports the restriction of cell phones in schools, but would not include Hochul’s proposal to require schools to adopt a written policy to ban phones by August. The Senate did include the governor’s proposal, but would prohibit schools from suspending students for cell phone use violations.