Adams reverses some cuts to schools in a third spending reversal in a week
Mayor Eric Adams said Friday he would reverse some of the previously announced cuts to New York City's education budget, which would have cut funding to high-needs schools and reduced the number of hours of free summer programs.
The cuts being restored are part of a nearly $550 million cut in school spending that Mr. Adams announced last fall amid a series of cuts to city agencies. The move caused an uproar among parents and prompted the teachers union to sue the city, arguing the administration violated state law by cutting school spending midyear for political reasons.
The reversal marked the mayor's third reversal this week. In announcing the broader cuts in November, he referenced the financial pressure caused by the arrival of tens of thousands of migrants from the southern border in recent months.
But Mr. Adams said this week that the city would return some funding to police, fire, parks and sanitation because of “better-than-expected tax revenues” and lower migrant care costs. Officials had previously estimated that housing and feeding migrants would cost $12 billion over three years, but they now say they will spend about 20 percent less than that, or about $9.6 billion.
The city will still demand that the Department of Education make more than $400 million of the planned cuts, including to programs like free child care. The total education budget for the current school year is approximately $37 billion.
“We don't want this to be taken as a signal that this city is out of the woods,” Mr. Adams said at a news conference. “We still have a $7 billion budget gap.”
The teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers, argued in its lawsuit that the announced cuts would have a “devastating impact” on public schools. The union's president, Michael Mulgrew, had previously said teachers could not afford a loss of resources in the wake of the pandemic, when many students were falling behind. The results of the national exams show that many children are still struggling to catch up.
Educators are already being forced to contend with overcrowded classrooms, a lack of materials and gaps in therapy services for children with disabilities, Mr. Mulgrew said.
“Suddenly the budget forecasts are not so bad, as we have said from the beginning,” the union said in a statement posted online. “Now he must go ahead and reverse the rest of his school budget cuts.”
The union will not say whether the lawsuit will continue.
When the mayor first ordered cuts at agencies, union officials and some officials wondered whether he had overestimated migrant-related costs in an effort to push President Biden to provide the city with more aid to deal with the crisis.
“The law does not allow school funding to be used as a political bargaining chip,” the union said in its lawsuit.
This week, the mayor said the police department could move forward with adding 600 recruits in April after warning of a hiring freeze. He reversed plans to eliminate one firefighter from each of the city's twenty five-person engine companies. And he canceled plans to remove 9,000 of the approximately 23,000 garbage baskets along the road.
Justin Brannan, a Democratic councilman from Brooklyn who heads the finance committee, wrote in one opinion column On Friday, the government announced it was taking a “doom and gloom” approach to the budget process and making “overly pessimistic” predictions about the city's economic health.
“There is no doubt that our city faces budget challenges,” wrote Mr. Brannan and Nathan Gusdorf, executive director of the Fiscal Policy Institute. “But exaggerating its severity and making unnecessarily large cuts inflicts real economic harm on working New Yorkers.”
Mr. Adams said Friday that arguments that “we are creating a crisis” “send the wrong message to New Yorkers.”
“And it sends the wrong message to Washington, DC,” he added.
Mr. Adams' announcement came less than 24 hours after a contentious public hearing on the future of mayoral control of the school system, where dozens of parents and educators argued that state lawmakers should eliminate or limit that authority. Mr Adams said on Friday he was meeting the needs of families.
“Why should we mess with what works?” he said.
The cuts in school spending would have forced a reduction in hours for the city's summer program, which is in such high demand that about 45,000 families who signed up last year got no seats. The cuts would have ended the program at 4 p.m. this summer, instead of 6 p.m., and eliminated the Friday service.
The administration will now pour $80 million in new city funds into the program, which is partially funded with federal aid that will soon expire.
Community schools, which offer counseling, clinics and adult classes to disadvantaged families, would also lose funding. Four of the schools, including two in Brooklyn — Public School 335 in Crown Heights and Intermediate School 96 in Bensonhurst — would have lost nearly $2 million combined, the teachers union said, forcing cuts to staff and specialized programs.
The mayor said Friday that about 170 schools would see a total of about $10 million in funding restored for these services.
The Ministry of Education said this separately that it wouldn't be necessary schools for children with the most advanced disabilities to reduce their budgets. There are about five dozen such schools in the city, and the principals of some of those schools said earlier this year that they had been asked to cut more than $1 million each. This is reported by news channel Chalkbeat.
The rollbacks would have left the schools “further out of compliance with special education requirements,” the union said in its lawsuit.
Other deep cuts are still expected across the school system and at other city agencies. After the city's three public library systems were forced to close on Sundays at many branches last month, library leaders have expressed concern that they could also be forced to end Saturday service.
Emma G. Fitzsimmons reporting contributed.