NYC school budget cuts total $649 million dollars as of May 22, 2023

May 23, 2023

Though the NYC Comptroller and others continue to use figures for school budget cuts this year that refer only to the reductions made to their Fair Student Funding allocations, for the last year or so we’ve been calculating the actual level of the much larger cuts to their entire budgets, called their Galaxy budgets.

The entire spread sheet that shows these cuts as of May 22, 2023 by school and district level is posted here.  You can download the file to see what cuts your school suffered.

The summary table is below.  It shows that as of yesterday, NYC schools had been cut by a net total of $659 million dollars;  81% of schools were cut by an an average of $592,000 each or 6.9%.

Of course the budget cuts were far larger than this initially, amounting to more than $1.4 billion in mid-July, which is the funding that most principals base their hiring decisions upon.

In any case, the DOE over-projected enrollment decline in their budgeting decisions, which led to greater numbers of lost teaching positions, contributing to a sharp increase in class size at many schools and more than 4,000 K12 teaching positions over the last five years. According to the Council analysis,  the DOE’s proposed budget for next year would lead to the elimination of another 800 or so full-time teaching positions, many of them already unfilled.