Testimony of Michael Sill, Assistant Secretary of the United Federation of Teachers, submitted before the New York City Council Committees on Finance and Education

Good afternoon, I am Michael Sill, and I am the Assistant Secretary of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). On behalf of our president, Michael Mulgrew, and the union’s more than 190,000 members, I would like to thank Finance Committee Chair Brannan, Education Committee Chair Joseph and all the members of the City Council for holding today’s public hearing on the New York City executive budget for fiscal year 2025. I am joined by Louis Cholden-Brown, Special Counsel for the union. 

First, let me thank you for your advocacy on behalf of the city's educators and for your determination to fund our public schools and protect them from any unnecessary and disruptive budget cuts. 

The City continues to realize additional tax revenue–as we all reasonably concluded despite Administration resistance months ago, acknowledge higher state and federal funding including $600m in Foundation Aid and $311.3 million in State asylum seeker funding, and further cut inflated asylum seeker cost projections by over $500 million. Given these budgetary changes coupled with rising surpluses, the Administration must fully reverse the drastic cuts to agencies, completely offset the impending stimulus fiscal cliff, and unconditionally and comprehensively fund its legal obligations to our school communities. 

In addition to socking away $1.45 billion in reserves that must be used by the end of the year, the Executive Budget continues to underestimate city revenues to the tune of $1 billion and under account for Foundation Aid by over $200 million. 

How can we have a robust and transparent budget process if OMB is incapable of even adding up the whole figures we’re receiving from the State? That’s why the UFT continues to call for an end to NYC’s budget soap opera and reforms to the budget process, including those in the appended submission. 

New York City has the funding it needs to properly support public education – City Hall continues to choose to play scarcity politics and force unwarranted tradeoffs. The UFT is therefore asking the City Council to once again partner with city students, parents and advocates to invest in our students by: 

• Implementing the class-size law by making sure additional funding reaches the schools; ensuring schools that are currently in compliance with the new class size limits are given the funding needed to stay in compliance; and dedicating additional funding to recruiting and retaining new teachers. 
• Hiring new teachers to close the current 8,100 pedagogical vacancies, which coupled with the 2,708 pedagogical positions funded with federal stimulus funds unfunded past FY24, contribute to the massive lack of compliance with special education and IEP mandates. These civil rights violations cannot stand which requires reversing the further 3,000 decrease in budgeted head counts for the out years. 
• Adding critical staff including social workers, counselors and school psychologists, who currently provide services at counselor ratios of as high as 1200:1 and social worker ratios above 3000:1.
• Advancing an agenda for career and technical education. 
• Expanding professional development opportunities for educators. 
• Supporting newly arrived migrant students and other newcomers to our school communities.
• Retrofitting our schools for resilience and accessibility.
• Sustaining essential education programs supported by federal COVID-19 stimulus dollars that were only partially restored including community schools, 3-K, preschool special education, and mental health services
• Strengthening the availability of childcare and early childhood education through restoring the draconian cuts to 3-K and 4-K and advancing the massively-delayed on-site childcare for city employees pilot and the numerous pending task forces and advisory boards tackling universal care and coverage; and 
• Maintaining and growing UFT programs that work: Teacher Center, United Community Schools, PROSE, Positive Learning Collaborative, BRAVE, Dial-A-Teacher, and Member Assistance Program. 

Avenues for New Revenues 

In addition to being honest and transparent about its financial health, the Administration must be innovative about finding new ways to enhance revenue. The City must more expeditiously launch a fully-staffed office of healthcare accountability which could save the city $2 billion annually, complete the requisite steps to obtain state and federal reimbursements, and secure the upwards of $1 billion in outstanding fines and fees. The Council should recoup surplus income from the economic development corporation, institute impact fees for city infrastructure including schools, and work to eliminate the $3b+ in economic development tax breaks that fail to deliver benefits. The Council should further undertake a comprehensive review of the taxing authority under Tax Law §§ 1201 and 1210 and Ad. Code §§ 11-604, 11-1704, and 11-1704.1. 

State Fiscal Year 2025 Reforms 

I think it is important to start by taking a moment to describe the transformational guard rails secured by the UFT in the State’s Fiscal Year 2025 budget and the Council’s critical role and obligations under these enhanced mandates. In addition to our shared victory in preserving increased Foundation Aid and delivering $600m in additional state education funds above last year, state lawmakers heard our frustration with the mayor’s unnecessary school budget cuts and the city’s resistance to implementing the class size law. The budget safeguards school budgets and requires the DOE to fully fund and implement the class size law. It requires the city to document its compliance in three major areas: 

• The city must give additional funds to individual schools so every school can meet the requirements of the class size law.
• The city cannot use increased state aid as a reason to lower its own investment in our schools. The additional $600 million in state funding this year must supplement, not supplant, city funding; a prescript that the City has already violated. 
• The city is prohibited from reducing its overall funding of city schools from year to year as it did last year when the FY24 budget illegally reduced the city amount by $500 million forcing the UFT to sue. Together the UFT, DOE and State Education Department will devise a framework to prevent shenanigans with the budget stabilization account (“roll”) or the reconciliation timeline to game the amount required to be committed. 

Violation of these requirements poses dire consequences for the City–agencies will be prevented from spending under a budget pending certification and eventually state school aid will be withheld. We are looking to the Council as frontline allies to make sure the Administration follows the law and our students and all New Yorkers do not suffer from their evasion. 

Despite the clear strictures of the SFY25 Budget, the executive budget illegally supplants community school funding and the DOE’s draft class size plan calls for illegally supplanting funding at individual schools. Applying recurring state funds to backfill programs including the November 2023 $8 million recurring PEG for 170 community schools for FY25-FY28 is a clear violation of the Education Law prohibition against supplanting funds allocated by the City last year. 

Section 1 of the SY24-25 draft class size plan includes language that the DOE “expects some schools to repurpose some existing funds towards class size from other uses.” Not only is this wholly unnecessary from a budgetary standpoint, it will not receive the UFT’s consent and violates the requirements of Ed. Law § 2576 regarding the adequate funding of individual schools. To the extent a school repurposes existing funds to class sizes and then uses Foundation Aid or Contract for Excellence funds to backfill current programming or staffing, a violation of Ed. Law § 211-d will have further occurred. 

Because of the guarantees secured in the State Budget, the UFT has withdrawn its lawsuit filed last year after the adopted FY24 Budget and November Plan violated the prior version of the “maintenance of effort” and “supplement not supplant” laws. However, we will not hesitate to return to court if necessary to enforce the enhanced protections and school-level class size compliance. 

DOE Budget 

While we are pleased to see the Mayor and Council jointly announce the use of $514 million in additional resources for the DOE, this amount, which largely relies on state funding the City failed to account for at the Preliminary budget, falls far short of preventing irreversible pain to our school communities, most especially our youngest learners, despite the continuing availability of vast unallocated resources. The $48 million to replace expiring federal stimulus funding for community schools is still a 13% cut to the previously budgeted figure and overall funding is $21 million less than this Council sought in its response. 

District 75 will still see a $3 million cut, Pre-School Special Ed $15 million in cuts and has only been baselined at 58% of the required amount. Federal law provides rights to students with disabilities that do not diminish with budgetary pressures, and the City must make the necessary investments to ensure all preschoolers with disabilities get the classes and services they need in a timely manner. 

The DOE will tell you the agency budget has grown from where it was at adoption last June and where it was in the Preliminary Financial Plan in January. What they will be less forthcoming about is that it has plummeted 2.3% or $800 million from the amount currently appropriated for this fiscal year. The Executive Budget recognizes $210 million in additional state funding but fails to account for another $230 million reflected in the State’s Enacted Budget. DOE claims the city has already increased city funding for the DOE by $1.6 B for next year but this amount does not deliver a single additional childcare seat, paraprofessional, program, or meal. Instead, each has been cut to the tune of over a combined $700 million. The additions in incredibly important categories that the City has historically failed to account for–pupil transportation, Carter cases, school cleaning, and over $1.1 billion in collective bargaining costs to better compensate teachers, administrators, facilities staff, lunch helpers, and the numerous others who provide a healthy, safe, and welcoming learning environment- are not a reason for slashing our students' learning and social emotional supports at a time of such resources. Indeed, since first being proposed in the January 2021 Financial Plan, the city amount for the DOE in FY25 has only grown $1.1 billion overall due to 6 rounds of PEGs by this Administration totaling over $2.2 billion. $2.2 billion in teachers, afterschool, early childhood education, computer science curricula, and food have been cut from this proposed budget, while charter school costs have exploded to the tune of an additional $370 million. 

All dollars are not equally spent and just because the DOE has caught onto the need to provide for certain underfunded categories does not obviate the Council from questioning the vast cuts to instruction, special education, and programs they seemingly mask. 

Charter § 100(b) requires “a written response to each of the expense budget priorities included in each community board's statement of budget priorities ... including the disposition of each such priority and a meaningful explanation of any disapprovals contained in such estimates or budget” and yet for hundreds of priorities OMB/DOE’s response was simply, “Please contact the Agency directly and promptly for more information.” Sometimes these replies garnered OMB’s written support, sometimes not, only further contributing to disclarity about the administration’s compliance and/or priorities. 

Perhaps more alarming than this simple failure to provide the required information were the few responses they did provide. Among the issues that OMB and the DOE said require “further study” are arts in the schools, moving schools to 100% accessibility, and reduced teacher-to-student ratios, while they opposed adequately cooling instructional spaces or upgrading flood prevention infrastructure. 

Class Size Reduction 

Though the Executive Budget contains no funds to lower class size, we welcome the commitment in the May 7 Class Size Plan of $137 million in additional funding for class size reduction; the appropriation of Contract for Excellence funds to schools also highlighted in that report is required by state law and should not be credited as a step to complying with the city’s obligation to fund class sizes as it remains appropriable to any of the five authorized non-class size uses. 

For the first time, the city is recognizing its financial responsibility to fund this work but that dedicated Foundation Aid must supplement city funding or run afoul of state law, and more support will be needed for school communities and more investment in capital construction. 

The City’s obligation to fund class size reduction is not contingent on the availability of aid from other sources and the Administration’s choice to not fund the class size project for two years cannot become a loophole to evade other obligations to our students and school communities. 

The state budget includes unambiguous language on the city's responsibility to provide funding for class size reduction 'sufficient to ensure individual schools can meet the class size compliance targets.' Thus, each school must be appropriately funded for its specific pedagogical needs and the hard-to-staff lines that ensure programs continue to be delivered with the required class sizes. 

The new language of Ed. Law § 2576 also requires the Department of Education to make whole those schools who diverted funding from other programming or staff to achieve the class size targets over the past two years. Remedying this inequity is a requirement for the schools who comprise the 39.6% of compliant classrooms that we currently have; they must be funded to preserve not only these class sizes but restore the full panoply of offerings they historically provided. 

Continued cuts to school budgets based on enrollment decline will only inhibit class-size reductions and the SFY25 budget reaffirms that the DOE must proactively maintain sufficient funding at these schools to retain sufficient teachers through continued Hold Harmless funding regardless of reduced federal stimulus funding. 

The Council permitting the appropriation of anything short of this is an impermissible violation of the statute that will preclude the City budget from being certified by the Mayor and Comptroller. The current school base allocations and fair student funding weights must be revisited as part of budget adoption to ensure these requirements are satisfied. 

Last week we released an analysis demonstrating that 856 New York City Title 1 high-need schools—enrolling more than 300,000 students, at all school levels and in every borough—have the space today to meet the state’s class size limits. 

These schools have space for over 207,000 additional seats in capped classrooms, yet will only need teachers for 31,318 students to lower class sizes and meet the state law and along with a $32 billion DOE budget and $10.7 billion in NYC surplus for FY 24 and FY 25, puts to bed City Hall’s false narrative, perpetuated in the May 7 report, about the decisions that schools will have to make and claims that a lack of space or funds prevents compliance with the law to bring our class sizes into line with schools in the rest of the state. 

Under Ed. Law § 2590-r, the Chancellor is required upon the release of the executive budget to inform the principal of each school of that school's preliminary budget allocation, and the principal to propose a school-based budget and demonstrate that the school-based budget proposal is aligned with the school's comprehensive educational plan and the class size law, which the chancellor must then certify. It is the product of such process that the Council is compelled to review and evaluate for compliance with Ed. Law § 2576 under the SFY25 Budget before adoption. 

Early Childhood Education 

The UFT’s #StartStrong campaign to protect 3-K and pre-K has organized more than 40,000 letters to the Mayor and Chancellor demanding that they grow back the early childhood programs they have decimated by restoring the $170 million in PEGs still unaccounted for, releasing the long-delayed Accenture report and moving the seats to identified areas of need, and relaunching the outreach teams. 

With six weeks to go in this fiscal year, the DOE lacks a rollout plan for the $1.5m added for early childhood outreach. We cannot let these funds be squandered through inaction, and we join the Council in calling for an additional $6.5 million in marketing and outreach funds for FY25 above the budgeted amount. 

Capital 

It is time to invest in the infrastructure of our NYC schools as our crumbling public-school infrastructure confronts the brunt of climate change. Most of our school buildings need basic repairs and upgrades to address everything from antiquated heating and air-conditioning systems to deteriorating rooftops to outdated electrical grids. 

The capital budget must take advantage of opportunities in the $2 trillion Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and allocate funds to retrofit our schools for climate resiliency, combat flooding and ensure the totality of schools—from the kitchens where our colleagues in DC37 work to instructional spaces, gymnasiums and auditoriums—are properly ventilated and air-conditioned. One critical step is the passage of Int.373 by CM Nurse. 

By investing in school infrastructure, we can create tens of thousands of good union jobs while making schools healthier and safer, taking on climate change, and saving $250 million per year in energy costs that can be reinvested in our schools. An estimated $400 million will electrify and weatherize 500 schools by 2030, while $1.25 billion over five years will ensure that half of our schools are accessible for all users by the end of the capital plan. 

The State FY25 Budget mandated that “[f]or the purpose of achieving the class size targets, as required by section 211-d of the education law, the city of New York shall increase planned spending on classroom construction by two billion dollars ($2,000,000,000) over and above the planned capital spending detailed in the February 2024 School Construction Authority capital plan.” Yet such funding to reverse the chilling effects of the mayor’s planned cuts is glaringly missing from the Executive Budget. 

Both the SCA capital plan and the capital budget must be amended to account for this funding and revise the capital plan’s current format — which does not provide proposed locations or grade level for 78% of projects. The plan’s lack of transparency violates both Education Law § 2590-o and the class size law itself: The DOE must submit an “annual capital plan for school construction and leasing to show how many classrooms will be added in each year and in which schools and districts to achieve the class size targets." 

Terms and Conditions 

The Council must prevent budget shenanigans and enact meaningful terms & conditions. Rather than giving the mayor a blank check, the Council must embrace its full powers to direct budgetary spending. The Council should bar the DOE from attaching funding to the use of specific assessments in elementary schools without regard to the quantity, frequency and efficacy of the assessment or the data it provides and support the UFT in evaluating current elementary school assessment uses, policies and practices to prioritize and reduce the number of assessments being given in our elementary schools. 

In the budget, the Council should also prohibit the mayor from downwardly adjusting allocations to any specific school mid-year and revise the Fair Student Funding formula to ensure our most vulnerable students have the resources they need to succeed. The appended Terms and Conditions one-pager expands upon our call for the Council to exercise policy-making control over the budget and direct, in a meaningful and substantive fashion, the implementation of the funded DOE programs and obligations. 

Commitment to Equity Endeavors 

In November 2022, New Yorkers voted to implement important programmatic changes to the New York City Charter but 18 months later, this administration continues to delay its obligations thereunder, only this Monday releasing citywide goals due nearly 7 months ago. A new Charter preamble, set out “collective values” to” guide the operation of our city government and inform and shape how the city carries out the duties, obligations, and authorities, and upholds and protects the rights set out in the charter.” It “endeavored to ensure that every person who resides in New York city has the opportunity to thrive with” among many other rights, “[q]uality and culturally-relevant child and youth supports, including early childhood and prekindergarten through twelfth grade education.” 

Agencies were required “to consider and be guided by the values set out in the preamble” and “examine the extent to which such values have been fulfilled through [their] policies and programs.” 

The Racial Justice Commission also created a process for agency and citywide racial equity plans containing among other important elements “Overarching citywide goals and strategies to improve racial equity throughout the city government’s policymaking, operations, and workforce, including the equitable distribution of benefits, of supportive services, and of environmental burdens by neighborhood” tied to the budget process that was to begin this year. And yet both the January 16 deadline for the preliminary plan and the April 26 deadline for the final plan came and went with no release. This week we learned that we can expect them in November despite the specific deadlines in the Charter being specifically chosen to facilitate community engagement, response from the Commission on Racial Equity, and review from the Council as the budget is negotiated. 

What we did all receive this week was a community equity goal from the Commission on Racial Equity to “[i]ncrease and appropriately fund school districts that are suffering from racial and class segregation to provide students, and families with social-emotional, health, educational, nutritional, and social services before, during, and out of school time hours year-round.” It is against this metric that the Council is required to measure the DOE’s proposed spending and find them lacking. 

Discretionary Funding Requests 

As President Mulgrew shared at March’s Preliminary Budget hearing, we are proud to say that UFT programs are among the best vehicles city government can use to ensure that the allocated funding for education makes it straight to the classroom and has a direct impact on students and educators. 

This year we submitted discretionary-funding applications for six programs that we ask the City Council to support: UFT Teacher Center, United Community Schools (UCS), Social-Emotional Supports through the Member Assistance Program (MAP) and Positive Learning Collaborative (PLC), Progressive Redesign Opportunity Schools for Excellence (PROSE), Building Respect, Acceptance and Voice through Education (BRAVE) hotline, and Dial-A-Teacher. We invite you to review the appended UFT priorities document for more about each program. 

Closing Thoughts 

The Enacted State Budget invested in bringing transformational change to New York City public schools. It is now incumbent upon the Council to ensure that funding and mandates not only permanently reduce class sizes for all our students but dramatically increases both academic and social emotional support for students and accelerate progress to make our schools carbon-free and healthy. 

The budget must not squander the resources we have all fought so hard to bring to our school communities. It must embrace the responsibility to provide a constitutionally sound basic education for all students and the required transparency to ensure City compliance with federal, state and local law before any vote. Any diminution will only force the Council back here over the summer lest funding be withheld. Before adopting the budget, it is incumbent that the Council ask itself: 

• Who is ultimately paying for community schools? Are schools being forced to backfill programs with state dollars? Has the Council secured sufficiently granular budget codes to ensure that no additional violations of Ed. Law § 211-d have occurred and attached terms and conditions that provide reporting and protections against mid-year changes? 
• Are individual schools adequately funded to comply with the class size law, including supporting those schools already meeting the targets? Do the DOE budget codes use sufficient granularity to ensure compliance? 
• Did the SCA Capital Plan and Capital Budget add the required $2 billion for class size compliance and readd all the elements required by the Education Law? 
• Is the DOE appropriately staffing to comply with its special education, IEP, and class size requirements or has it been permitted to continue its planned cuts of 3,000 additional pedagogues on top of 8,000+ vacancies? 
• Have accurate numbers been used to calculate year-to-year changes in city funding for the DOE to prevent a repeat of last year’s $500 million cut? 
• Has the budget reversed the $170 million in cuts to early childhood? 
• Has the budget complied with the goals of the Charter preamble or the Draft Community Equity Priorities? 
• Does the budget contain the requisite information for the Council to make these determinations? 

Only in answering these questions will the Council have fulfilled its duties and answered the calls of the New York City school communities. We are lucky that compliance does not pose hard choices, despite the Administration’s rhetoric, with sustainable revenues far exceeding those in the Executive Budget and state aid that remains unallocated, if only the Council has the will to act. 

I want to thank you again for today’s hearing. We look forward to our continued engagement throughout this budget process.