What to know about the Education Department cuts to NYC school budgets

Debate has raged since the June adoption of the New York City budget over steep cuts to public schools, but there’s still remarkably little agreement over the exact amount being slashed from school coffers.

City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (D-Queens) acknowledged the ongoing confusion Friday when faced with questions about the cuts and the council’s efforts to restore them. “There are not a lot of numbers floating around out there,” she said on WNYC. “The council is still trying to drill down on what that number is.”

Estimates of the budget cuts range from more than $1 billion to the hundreds of millions. Advocates and educators say the cuts are already resulting in teachers losing their jobs and vital programs getting cut.

Here’s what to know about how the city school system’s budget works and a breakdown of the different ways to measure the cuts.

How the DOE budget works:

The Education Department has a total budget of roughly $38 billion for Fiscal Year 2023 — but only a portion of that sum flows directly to schools to pay for staff, programs, supplies and more.

The money that goes to individual schools comes in two distinct buckets.

First, there’s Fair Student Funding, a formula that the city uses to allot money to schools based on their enrollment and particular student needs. Fair Student Funding accounts for the lion’s share of the cash principals use each year to pay for staff, and typically fluctuates if enrollment changes.

That changed during the pandemic, when former Mayor Bill de Blasio temporarily paused the policy of cutting schools’ Fair Student Funding when they lost enrollment. Mayor Adams reinstated the policy this year — meaning schools have to pay for both past enrollment losses and projected future ones.

There’s a second bucket of everything else that goes directly to schools but is not part of the Fair Student Funding formula — from federally mandated programs like Title I, which distributes money to schools with high levels of poverty, to special city initiatives like Summer Rising.

Added together, these two buckets comprise all the money available to principals in a given year — what’s called their “Galaxy” budget.

What’s being cut?

This is where it gets tricky. There’s a flurry of different numbers going around that each reflect different ways of measuring the cuts. Here’s what some of them mean.

One approach is comparing this year’s Fair Student Funding allotment, announced in June, to last year’s.

An analysis by comptroller Brad Lander found that the more than 1,500 public schools that get money through Fair Student Funding are receiving a total of $372 million less through the formula than last year.

To be specific, schools are losing an estimated $215 million because of enrollment declines earlier in the pandemic, and another $157 million due to next year’s projected enrollment losses, according to the Lander analysis.

But that’s not the whole store. There are roughly 350 schools gaining Fair Student Funding to the tune of $97 million, while approximately 1,170 schools are losing a total of $469 million, Lander found.

Then there’s the second bucket — everything distributed outside of the Fair Student Funding formula. It’s harder to measure cuts in that bucket because the DOE keeps adding to it throughout the year.

The advocacy group Class Size Matters found that schools have received a total of $1.4 billion less in their “Galaxy” budgets through the first two months of fiscal year 2023 than they had by the end of fiscal year 2022.

The DOE argues that it’s unfair to compare a full year’s-worth of funding with just two months. Using the Education Department’s preferred calculation, schools lost a total of $285 million in their Galaxy budgets compared to last year, according to a DOE spokesman.