Last week we shared how to check to see if your school’s budget was cut for this upcoming 2022-23 school year. Now, we know just how much the New York City school budget has been axed for September: $215 million. And while teachers and families have organized rallies in outrage over the news, Mayor Eric Adams says that since the lower budget is based on lower enrollment, it doesn’t count as a cut.
This will be the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic began that NYC schools are once again basing school budgets on enrollment numbers. City schools have lost around 120,000 students over the last five years, but the city had previously paused the usual format of calculating the budgets for individual schools on their enrollment numbers due to the pandemic. Now, schools face the issue of losing staff, loss of programming funding and larger class sizes — all while lawmakers have just passed a bill to cap class sizes.
