Librabries

Funding Cuts Could Shelve Many Library Branches

1 Comment

Posted April 13, 2011 by Kate Maher and Doug Turetsky

Just three years after the Mayor and City Council reached a funding agreement to keep the city’s more than 200 branch libraries open at least six days a week, many branches have had to scale back their hours of operation. City funding for New York’s three library systems is on the wane and could reach its lowest level since the 1990s under the Mayor’s preliminary budget plan for next year (chart).

If the city subsidy for the libraries remains at the level proposed by the Mayor for the fiscal year that begins July 1, more than three dozen branch libraries may be closed and others would have to cut back the number of hours they are open each week. After peaking at $301.7 million in 2009, not including funding for the research libraries, the city’s subsidy for the libraries has declined to a projected $270.1 million this year. The Mayor’s budget plan for 2012 would reduce the city subsidy by 22 percent to $209.9 million.

The funding fall-off is already taking a toll on the city’s three library systems, particularly the systems in Brooklyn and Queens (the New York Public Library has branches in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island). According to the most recent Mayor’s Management Report, Brooklyn’s branch libraries opened for an average of 35.5 hours per week in July through October 2010. That’s down from an average of more than 44 hours a week in fiscal year 2010 (July 2009-June 2010). In fiscal year 2010, all of the branch libraries were open at least six days a week. During the first four months of fiscal year 2011 (July-October 2010), barely a third of the branches were open six days a week.

In Queens, the average number of hours libraries are open each week has declined from nearly 43 hours in 2010 to a little above 40 hours a week during the first four months of 2011. In 2010, about three-quarters of the Queens’ branches were open six days a week; during the first four months of this fiscal year the share had dropped to 53 percent.

Funding constraints could entirely shelve some library branches next year if the city subsidy for the three system declines by $60.2 million to $209.9 million as the Mayor has proposed for 2012. Brooklyn would shutter 16 branches and Queens 14, according to information compiled by the City Council. Even the New York Public Library, which has managed to maintain nearly the same level of service this year despite the decline in city support, would have to close 10 branches.
Mayors frequently propose cuts to the subsidy for the libraries, only to restore the funds in budget negotiations with the City Council. Indeed, the Mayor and Council reversed the proposed cut for this year with a $57.5 million restoration in funds for the three systems. But with teacher layoffs, fire company closings, the elimination of thousands of child care slots, and other spending cuts in the Mayor’s budget plan, finding the money to restore the library subsidy this time around is far from assured.

Despite the reduced hours they are open, the libraries remain much in demand. Attendance at Brooklyn’s public libraries is expected to reach 14 million visits this year, up nearly 2 million from last year. While library visits in Queens are projected to drop by about 177,000 this year, that’s still more than 13.9 million visits.

Continued demand in the face of declining funds is probably a key reason the city’s 59 community boards ranked library services their third highest budget concern this year, rising from seventh last year. Brooklyn’s community boards ranked libraries their top priority.

Seniors

Mapping Senior Centers That May Be Closed: For 15, No Other Centers Within a Mile

Posted by Nashla Rivas Salas, March 24, 2011

The Governor’s Executive Budget proposes a change in the use of federal funds that could result in the closure of 105 senior centers administered by the city’s Department for the Aging (DFTA). This change would affect approximately 8,000-10,000 seniors citywide, leaving them in some cases with no other center nearby.

IBO mapped how far each of the senior centers at risk of being closed is from the nearest center remaining open. Fifteen of the 105 senior centers have no other center within a mile radius. Eight of these fifteen are located in Queens, two in Brooklyn, two in the Bronx and three in Staten Island. A list of the centers is available here.

The Governor’s budget proposes to eliminate the discretionary portion of the Social Services Block Grant (Title XX), and instead require that the entire block grant be spent for child welfare services. The city has traditionally used its annual discretionary Title XX allocation of $24 million to fund a significant number of its senior centers. Unless other funding is allocated to make up its portion of the block grant, DFTA has said it will be forced to close centers. In deciding which centers would close if the state plan is implemented, city officials have said that they chose to spread the cuts as equally as possible across community districts. But senior centers are not spread evenly across the city and some communities have multiple centers. As a result, those districts with more centers were more likely to have centers selected for closing.

Currently the city contracts with 256 senior centers. If the state budget is approved next month with the elimination of the discretionary portion of Title XX, the city will be left with about 150 centers, a significant reduction in services to a vulnerable population.

Education

Charter Schools Housed in the City’s School Buildings Get More Public Funding per Student than Traditional Public Schools

7 Comments

Posted by Ray Domanico and Yolanda Smith, February 15, 2011

Last February, IBO published estimates (Comparing the Level of Public Support: Charter Schools versus Traditional Public Schools) of the level of public financial support for the city’s traditional public schools and charter schools in school year 2008–2009. Our new review of public financial support for general education services during 2009–2010 finds that charter schools located in public school buildings received an average of $649 more per student than traditional public schools. We have also updated our estimate for 2008-2009 to reflect some revisions to our methodology.

We estimate that total public financial support in 2009–2010 for general education services averaged $16,011 per pupil in traditional public schools, $16,660 per pupil in charter schools housed in public school buildings, and $13,653 per pupil in charter schools housed in private space (see Comparison of Funding Traditional Schools Versus Charter Schools table) The reason we calculate a higher funding allocation for charters housed in public school buildings than charters in private space is the value of in-kind services they receive due to their location: charter schools co-located in public school buildings don’t have to budget for space costs and utilities, janitorial services, or school safety agents. As of 2009-2010, two-thirds of the city’s 98 charter schools were housed in public school buildings.

School year 2009-2010 was the last year of a funding freeze on the state-mandated charter school per pupil allocation. The freeze was lifted for the current 2010–2011 school year, increasing the per capita adjusted operating expense for charter schools in New York City by $1,084. The adjusted operating expense per capita is the largest public source of funding for charter schools. When complete data from 2010–2011 become available, they are almost certain to show an even greater advantage for those charters housed within public school buildings compared with traditional public schools.

Applying our revised methodology to the 2008–2009 data, we now estimate that average public funding for traditional public schools was $15,672 per pupil that year. IBO’s estimates of public support for charter schools housed in public school buildings and charter schools in private space for 2008–2009 were unchanged at $16,373 and $13,661 per pupil, respectively.

Based on our revised approach, we estimate that charters in public school buildings received public funding that exceeded the support for traditional public schools by an average of $701 per pupil in 2008–2009. We’d previously estimated that funding for charter schools housed in public school buildings averaged $305 less per pupil. Our conclusions for charters housed in private space have not changed dramatically; these schools still received significantly less per pupil than did traditional public schools. (For an explanation of our methodological changes and a crosswalk between the estimates we published last year and our revised estimates for 2008–2009 see “Changes in Methodology.”)

With an overall increase in the Department of Education’s budget from 2008–2009 to 2009–2010, the funding provided to traditional public schools increased by an average of $339 per pupil. Average funding of charter schools housed within public school buildings increased $287 per pupil, while funding for charter schools housed in private space inched down by $8 per pupil. Thus, the funding advantage for charter schools housed in public school buildings narrowed somewhat in 2010, while the funding disadvantage for charter schools housed in private space widened.

For background on how we did the comparisons and detailed tables of our calculations click here.

Education, Transportation

What is Yellow and Rises at the Same Time it Falls?

Posted by Yolanda Smith, December 23, 2010

Many school kids love puzzles, and extra credit is in order for any who can solve a particularly tough one about the yellow buses that take more than 140,000 children to and from school each day. Currently, yellow bus service is one of the fastest growing parts of the overall Department of Education budget. And here is the puzzle: why are these costs rising even as their ridership falls?

Generally, state law sets the criteria for transportation to school of public and nonpublic school students. Eligibility basically rests on the distance students live from their schools, with variations depending upon grade level. New York City sets its own minimum distance requirements, which provide transportation for more students than the state requires. The state also requires school districts to transport students with disabilities or living in temporary housing.

This school year the city’s total school transportation costs are expected to exceed $1 billion. The biggest portion of this is the cost of contracting for the school buses, which grew from $772 million in 2005-2006 to $887 million in 2009-2010, an increase of $115 million. Over that five-year period, the cost of yellow buses for general education students jumped $86 million or 16 percent and for special education students $29 million or 15 percent.

But fewer kids rode the buses last year as compared with the 2005-2006 school year. The number of students riding the buses in 2005-2006 totaled 156,980. They included 96,384 general education students and 60,596 special education students. By last school year, the number of general education students riding yellow buses had fallen 12 percent and special education ridership fell 6 percent. (It’s worth noting that during this same period the number of kids using student MetroCards grew from 520,596 to 579,984, yet the city’s cost remained $45 million a year under the long standing agreement with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.)

So what’s driving up costs even as ridership declines? One piece of the puzzle may be the contracts the education department has with the companies that supply the buses and personnel such as drivers and matrons. These contracts allow price increases for things like fuel to be passed on to the city. But the average price of fuel in New York grew by only 4 percent from 2006 through 2010, much less than the overall increase in yellow bus spending.

Limited competition may be another piece to the puzzle. A side-by-side comparison shows that fewer vendors are providing yellow bus services to the city’s public, private, and parochial schools in 2009-2010 than were in 2005-2006. Although the education department does not use competitive bidding to award yellow bus contracts, having fewer vendors to work with can weaken the city’s bargaining position.

The rising cost of insurance, which swelled from $15 million to $25 million over the last five years, also played a role. The additional $10 million was specifically for insuring buses carrying special education students and accounted for over one-third of the increased cost of busing these students. (In the current school year insurance costs are expected to decline by $1 million.)

Clearly, there are other pieces to solving this puzzle. The increasing emphasis on school choice may have played a role in pushing up the cost of busing as students attend schools farther away from their homes. It is also possible that school bus routes have become less efficient as the number of students riding the buses has declined. A few years ago the education department sought to improve route efficiency, an effort that left some kids literally standing on frozen street corners in January waiting for buses that never came. Public outcry led to the reversal of much of that initiative.

While we have no definitive answer to why school bus costs are rising even as ridership is falling, there’s one factor that makes this a little bit less pressing from the perspective of the city budget: transportation costs are partially reimbursed from state aid for education. At least for now, city dollars have been a declining share and are expected to represent only 38 percent of transportation funding while state aid is the main support for these expenditures and makes up the balance.

New York City residents, of course, also pay state taxes, so they end up paying coming and going.

Parks, Seniors, Youth

Double Fault: Will Mayor’s Plan to Hike City Rec Center, Tennis Court, & Ball Field Fees Undermine His Efforts to Promote Healthy Living?

7 Comments

Posted by Yevgeniya Bukshpun, December 7, 2010

Despite its highly publicized goal of promoting a healthy lifestyle among city residents, the Bloomberg Administration announced plans to double the membership fees at the city’s recreational centers and increase the costs for tennis and ball field permits as part of its latest budget plan. The result may be that a signature policy, whose long-term goal is to improve the health of New Yorkers, may be undermined by a shorter-term goal of balancing the budget.

Children and youth would still be admitted to recreation centers for free, while adults would have to pay $150 per year for centers with pools, up from $75, and pay $100 for centers without pools, up from $50. Membership fees for senior citizens, who currently pay $10 per year, would increase to $25.

Seasonal tennis permits for adults would also double, from $100 to $200, while single play permits would rise from $7 to $15. Permits for ball field use would also increase: fees for fields without lights would rise from $16 to $25 and those for lighted fields would rise from $32 to $50.

The recent history of the city’s recreational centers reflects a persistent tension between recovering costs for services and a broader goal of providing equitable access to recreational opportunities for all city residents. Prior to 2002, all of the city’s recreational centers were free of charge but welcomed user donations. Faced with the economic crisis after the Sept. 11 attacks, the city instituted mandatory fees at all but six recreational centers that were funded by federal grant money. In July 2006, the parks department began charging fees at all recreational facilities.

This next round of fee hikes comes at a time when many New Yorkers rely on these recreational centers and facilities as an affordable alternative to more expensive private clubs. In 2010, 174,000 New Yorkers were members of the city’s recreational centers. Membership among seniors and children has been increasing each year since 2006. Kids make up 36 percent of center users, while about 20 percent of members are seniors. Adults, at nearly half the total membership, represent the largest share of those who use recreational centers. Yet adults may have been the most sensitive to fee increases as adult membership declined by 38 percent after the expansion of mandatory fees in fiscal year 2007 and took two years to rebound. Since 2007, overall membership at the city’s recreational centers has trended upward.

While the 2007 drop in membership may have been caused by more than just the fee hike, given the continued high level of unemployment in the city it is likely that membership will decrease as a result of the fee increases. Access to public recreational facilities contributes to overall public health and the fee increase may seriously undercut access in low-income communities that are likely to be especially sensitive to price increases. Low-income communities experience higher rates of obesity and diabetes, with 7 in 10 residents overweight or obese, compared with the citywide average of 6 in 10 residents.

As the number of adult and senior citizen members increased over the past few years, revenue from recreation center membership fees reached $4.8 million in fiscal year 2010. Assuming a 5 percent decline in membership, the parks department expects the higher membership fees to increase city revenue by $1 million in the current fiscal year and by $4 million each year starting in 2012, bringing the total membership revenue to $5.8 million in 2011 and $8.8 million in 2012. In 2010, revenue covered less than one-quarter of the $21.5 million the city spent operating the centers. If fees are raised as proposed and the department’s forecast of modest declines in membership proves correct, membership revenue would still cover less than half the cost of operating the centers.

The likelihood of significant new revenue from a fee increase on the sale of tennis permits is less certain. In fiscal year 2010, the city issued 12,800 permits to use tennis courts, which generated $1.8 million of revenue. Officials project the same 5 percent decline in tennis permits as in recreation center memberships as a result of the increase in fees. If so, sales of tennis permits would bring in $1.2 million of additional funds in 2011 and total $3.0 million. In 2012 through 2014 the parks department expects the higher priced permits to score $3.4 million in annual revenue.

But these revenue projections may be too optimistic given the behavioral change seen a few years ago. IBO’s previous research found that doubling the cost of adult season tennis court passes in 2003—from $50 to $100—led to a 40 percent drop in sales volume, as players switched to single-play passes. Sales of single-play passes, the price for which remained unchanged at $5 until 2005—increased, yet total revenues rose only marginally from $1.2 million in 2002, prior to the fee increase, to $1.4 million in 2005 following both fee increases.

Whether the city is able to generate the additional revenues it projects will depend on how city residents react to a 100 percent increase in recreation center membership fees and tennis permits and a nearly 60 percent increase in ball field permits at a time when many New Yorkers are still struggling to recover from the economic downturn. Residents may seek out less expensive ways to stay physically fit or stay home altogether and undermine the Mayor’s efforts to keep them healthy.

Education

Education Department Releases Plan to Add 20,000 New School Seats, but Where’s the Money?

Posted by Sarita Subramanian, November 22, 2010

The city’s newly released proposal to increase the plan for building, expanding, and repairing schools by $4.5 billion, or 38 percent, has received scant attention as the media has been focused on the appointment of a new Chancellor at Tweed Courthouse. The increase included in this year’s proposed amendment to the Fiscal Year 2010-2014 Five-Year Capital Plan was surprising, not so much for its identification of the need for 20,000 additional seats, but for the reliance on substantial amounts of additional funding from the city and the state with no detail on how it could be provided.

The timing of the education department’s acknowledgement of the need for more seats is also interesting, given the budget strains faced by the city and especially the state. Like the previous five-year plan (2005-2009) the current plan assumes that the costs will be funded equally by the city and state governments.

The bulk of the newly proposed spending aims to increase the school system’s capacity. Advocates have been calling for additional seats since the plan was originally adopted in June 2009, and the Department of Education has had to scramble—not always successfully—to identify classroom space to meet growing demand in a number of communities in recent years. The amendment adds $3.4 billion to the five-year plan to fund almost 20,000 additional seats, bringing the total number of new seats in the plan to about 50,000. Most of these new seats in the amendment, 18,883, would be at the elementary and middle school levels.

This emphasis reflects what the education department has described as “the start of a new growth trend” in public schools in the city. Total enrollment increased in the 2009-2010 school year after seven years of decline. School Construction Authority projections indicate that this increase is not an anomaly, but the beginning of a persistent trend, fueled by two main factors. First, enrollment in public and charter schools is increasing as enrollment in nonpublic schools is declining. Second, there is evidence that more students are remaining in the public school system for longer spans.

The amendment also proposes an increase of $1 billion in technology improvements to expand the Department of Education’s Innovation Zone program to reach a total of 200 schools. The department is also focusing on enabling on-line assessments in English and math in the 2014-2015 school year, on-line advance placement courses, and on-line credit recovery courses. All of the additional funding for technology is expected to be allocated in 2011-2013. The total for technology in the plan is $1.8 billion.

The great unknown surrounding the plans laid out in this amendment is the source of funding. The five-year plan counted on the state-funded borrowing of $1.071 billion for fiscal year 2010. Under the amendment, the state’s annual contribution would range from $1.326 billion in fiscal year 2011 to $2.135 billion in fiscal year 2014. Focusing on the November 2010 amendment alone, the increases in borrowing would require additional support from the state totaling an increase of 39 percent over the five years. The biggest year-over-year jump in state funding would occur in fiscal year 2013, when the plan anticipates a 43 percent increase. While the state’s fiscal condition three years from now remains an unknown, we do know it’s currently looking at steep budget gaps: $9 billion in the fiscal year starting April 1, 2011 and more than $17 billion in the following year, according to the latest estimates by the state’s Division of the Budget.

If the increases in state and city funding anticipated in the amendment occur as planned, the city will make progress toward alleviating current and projected school overcrowding. If the money does not materialize, families in some neighborhoods—particularly in Brooklyn and Queens, where 67 percent of the new seats are planned—will be left scrambling for scarce seats, little comforted by the knowledge that the capital plan included the best of intentions.

Goverment Operations/Performance

How the MMR Went MIA

Posted by Doug Turetsky, October 27, 2010

Perhaps the most noticeable thing about the Mayor’s Management Report released last month was how little notice it got. Among the city’s daily newspapers, just the Daily News gave it any ink, and that was a modest 145 words.

That’s a far cry from the not so distant past, when release of the Mayor’s Management Report was a full-scale press event, resulting in significant attention from legislators, civic organizations, and the general public. Long viewed as one of the major reports coming from City Hall and a public marker of Mayoral successes and failures, the report’s stature has clearly declined.

If size is any measure of prominence, compare this year’s volume of 226 pages (plus about 206 pages of definitions and 63 pages of additional tables available online) to the management report issued by then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for fiscal year 1997: there was a 112-page summary volume, a 311-page volume of agency narratives, a 308-page volume of agency and citywide indicators, and a separate volume of more than 90 charts for the press. Based on a Nexis search, stories of 500 or more words appeared in The New York Times, Daily News, and Newsday the day after the report’s release that year.

Granted, such data avalanches can bury useful information under piles of less useful information, which can enable turning the Mayor’s Management Report into more of a public relations document than what it is supposed to be, a clear presentation of its hits and misses. Point readers to what you want them to see and leave it to others to have the energy or initiative to find numbers that might be less favorable.

To its credit, the Bloomberg Administration has sought to turn the management report into a more meaningful and accessible assessment of city government performance. An emphasis was placed on indicators reflecting outcomes. Unfortunately, much useful data was dropped from the report—information essential to understanding underlying trends.

Say, for example, you’re trying to determine if the trimmed down police force, which must now also devote a lot of its energy to counterterrorism, is able to respond fast enough to calls for help. The management report used to present response times to calls of crimes in progress by borough, now there’s only a citywide number, a figure not particularly helpful given the city’s geographic size, more than 300 square miles.

Council Member Melissa Mark-Viverito has introduced legislation to restore another important piece of information no longer part of the Mayor’s Management Report: the number of radio runs the police make each year related to domestic violence. The report also used to routinely tell us how many arrests there were for violations of orders of protection. This is the kind of information that can be helpful in gauging the city’s efforts to combat domestic violence. So the relevant stats—the inputs necessary to understand the outcomes—should be part of the report, or at least made available as a regularly updated online supplement.

Making the management report matter again may also be an issue of timing. When the Mayor’s Management Report was instituted in the mid-1970s, the intention was to help inform budget decisions. That intent is no less important today. In the past IBO and others have suggested the management report be released in conjunction with the Mayor’s Executive Budget. Rather than fading into the bureaucratic morass, the Mayor’s Management Report should be an essential tool during budget deliberations.

Municipal Labor

Sick Days and the City

Posted by Doug Turetsky & Bernard O’Brien, October 13, 2010

With Mayor Bloomberg making plain how much he dislikes the City Council bill that would require businesses to provide employees with paid sick leave, it seems like a good moment to look at how much sick leave is used by city workers. In fiscal year 2010 (which ended in June), city workers on average used 8.5 paid sick days—just about the nine days that the Council bill says businesses with 20 or more employees should provide for its workers.

As is often the case, averages can hide some interesting variations. There are substantial differences between the numbers of paid sick days taken by workers at different agencies. Based on data for 34 city agencies compiled by the Mayor’s office and available here, the number of paid sick days used last year by city workers (not including days lost to on-the-job injuries) ranged from 12 by uniformed correction officers to just five by staff members of the department of parks—maybe there is something to the old adage about the health benefits of outdoors work.

Or at least some kinds of outdoors work. Uniformed sanitation workers clocked in a comparatively high number of sick days. Just as working inside a jail may not be the healthiest of occupations, it’s probably no surprise given the nature of their job that sanitation workers used an average of 11.5 sick days last year. What may come as a surprise is that police officers and firefighters used fewer sick days than the citywide average: 6.6 for police and 7.0 for uniformed firefighters.

There are some other seeming anomalies in the use of paid sick days. Maybe it has something to do with being a tax collector, but over at the finance department, workers used an average of nearly 11 paid sick days last year. Perhaps working with musty documents also takes a toll on health. Staffers at the Department of Records used an average of about 10 paid sick days last year.

On the healthier side of the sick leave ledger, Landmarks Preservation Commission staff used a comparatively modest average of 6.2 sick days in 2010. And despite working for an agency whose name and mission is synonymous with stress, staff at the Office of Emergency Management averaged just 6.1 sick days.

The number of paid sick days that city employees are entitled to varies depending upon their civil service title and, in some cases, time on the job. An IBO analyst, for example, earns 10 a year, growing to 12 after five years of city employment.

Citywide, use of paid sick leave has edged downward under Mayor Bloomberg, from 9.2 days on average during his first full year in office to last year’s 8.5.

Taxes

Attention Shoppers! For a Limited Time Only: The Clothing Tax Returns

Posted by Andrew Liebowitz, September 30, 2010

Thanks to the New York State budget adopted in July, clothing and footwear will get pricier for retail shoppers in New York starting tomorrow October 1. That’s when the 4.0 percent New York State sales tax and 0.375 percent Metropolitan Transportation Authority-dedicated sales tax on clothing under $110 return. From then on, anyone buying a coat that costs $109 will have to shell out $113.77. Or at least they will for a number of months. With the exemption on sales tax for clothing and shoes under $110 scheduled to return in phases over the next 16 months, a calendar may prove to be a helpful shopping tool.

In the first phase, the state sales tax and the portion of the sales tax dedicated to the MTA will be temporarily reinstated for clothing under $110 from October 1, 2010 through March 31, 2011. In the second phase, which runs from April 1, 2011 through March 31, 2012, clothing under $55 will be exempt from state and transit sales tax. And in the third phase, beginning April 1, 2012, clothing under $110 will once again be free of sales tax. MTA funding will not be affected during any phase of the legislation; when the sales tax earmarked for transit is suspended, the state and city each put up half the money to compensate the MTA for any revenue foregone.

The city has the option of following the state’s lead and temporarily repealing its own sales tax exemption for clothing under $110. If it did, clothing shoppers would pay sales tax totaling 8.875 percent: 4.5 percent for the city, 4.0 percent for the state, and 0.375 percent for the MTA. Repeal of the city’s exemption would require action by the Mayor and City Council.

The Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget estimates that the current sales tax exemption on clothing under $110 costs the city over $300 million annually. While repeal of the city’s exemption would provide a significant amount of revenue at a time when the Mayor is again proposing cuts to the city budget, opponents of restoring the tax argue that it would hurt local clothing merchants competing with jurisdictions that don’t tax clothing sales. They also point out that sales taxes on clothing are generally regressive, falling more heavily on those who can least afford it.

After taking into account clothing sales lost to other states with lower taxes, the New York State Division of the Budget estimates that taxing all clothing sales will increase the state’s sales tax receipts by $330 million for state fiscal year 2010-2011. With the sales tax exemption for clothing under $55 scheduled to be restored on April 1, 2011, the Division of the Budget expects a somewhat smaller revenue increase of $210 million for 2011-2012.

Implementation of the sales tax changes take on added complications with mail order and online sales, rain checks, layaway sales, and exchanges. The New York State Department of Taxation and Finance offers a guide that explains when the clothing tax should be applied to these types of sales.

Education

As the School Year Begins, School Budgets are Up and Down

1 Comment

Posted by Yolanda Smith, September 21, 2010

As students and teachers headed back to school this month it was widely reported that given lower state aid, growing enrollment, and rising costs, school budgets had been cut. But the effect differed from school to school, with some schools even seeing their allocation per student rise. To provide parents, teachers, policymakers, and other interested New Yorkers with a clearer view of the funding available for schools across the city, IBO compared the initial allocation each school received to fund its basic operations this September with the allocation last September. Click here to look up the figures for particular schools.

Much of the year-to-year change was due to annual adjustments that take into account changes in the make-up of a school’s student body (how many students need special ed, are performing below standards, etc), plus changes in a school’s enrollment. But some of the change this year arose from funding shortfalls that threatened to leave some schools with budgets too small to cover basic operations, which led the education department to shift some of the basic allocation funding.

More schools than not will begin this year with less money per pupil for their basic operations than they had at the beginning of last school year. According to IBO’s calculations, 864 out of 1,464 schools have received an initial operating allocation per pupil that is less than last year’s. In contrast, 585 schools have received a greater per pupil allocation than last year, and 15 received exactly what they had a year ago, on a per-pupil basis. (Schools which have either been closed by the Department of Education or newly opened this year are not included in these counts.) These changes have real consequences—among schools with lower per capita allocations this year, the median decline was $151. In a school of 500 students such a change is roughly equivalent to the cost of one teacher. (Click here for table showing how changes in percentage terms were distributed.)

Each year the education department creates school allocation memoranda, often referred to as SAMs. These SAMs detail for principals the various sums of money available for each school’s budget. The most important of these, SAM #1, sets up the opening basic operating condition and the allocation of dollars largely through the fair student funding (FSF) formula, although some non-FSF funds are included in this allocation. In this post, we are comparing the initial SAM#1 FSF allocations made to schools this year and last year.

Fair student funding—the largest part of the SAM#1 allocation—is the method used since school year 2007-2008 to distribute most of the city and unrestricted state funds needed to run the schools. The FSF formula takes into account the student demographics at each school, with more money allocated for higher needs students. The FSF allocation is the core of a school’s budget, covering instructional staff and school operating overhead. The total amount of FSF allocated through SAM #1 this year is $4.4 billion, $91 million more than last year (including hold harmless and incremental funding, which are explained below).

The fair student funding methodology was originally going to be implemented gradually. In order to preserve stability and protect core programs in the first two years of implementation, the FSF allocations included hold-harmless money to avoid funding reductions for schools deemed “overfunded” under the formula. Schools deemed “underfunded” under the formula were only allocated enough to eliminate 55 percent of their shortfall with the expectation that their allocations would increase over time. The goal was to have all underfunded schools receive their full FSF funding level by 2009-2010. Yet as early as school year 2008-2009, the education department indicated that full implementation was likely to be slowed without adequate state and city funding. (See IBO’s report on FSF “New Funding Formula Seeks to Alter School Budget Disparities” for more details.)

Changes in the characteristics of a school’s student body generate changes in per pupil funding because FSF takes into account individual student needs. The formula, in other words, is weighted based on needs. Each student starts with a weight based on grade level, which can grow depending on the student’s characteristics. For example, a high school student performing below standards has 0.25 added on to her weight and high school students in English learner classes receive an extra 0.50 weight. All students’ weights are translated into dollars which determine the FSF formula allocation for the school.

The effect of changes in individual school demographics on each school’s SAM #1 allocation can be observed by looking at the percentage change in dollar allocations per needs-weighted student. We found that these changes in school demographics explain much, but not all, of the changes in per pupil funding for individual schools

Using the weighted student enrollment, the year to year per capita changes tended to be smaller compared to the simple per capita change, with most schools clustered between -2.9 percent and plus 2.9 percent, but there were still a significant number of schools that saw larger changes. One hundred and two schools saw their allocation per weighted student decrease by 3 percent or more and 151 schools increased by 3 percent or more. In total, 68 percent of all schools experienced a decrease in funding in weighted per pupil terms.

The combined effect of rising costs and reduced state aid also played a role in this year’s funding changes for schools. The Department of Education initially attempted to deal with these pressures, along with rising enrollment, by imposing a 4 percent cut on school budgets for the 2010-2011 school year; the second consecutive year with such a cut. After calculation of the baseline formula incorporating the 4 percent cut, the education department determined it had a problem: 400 schools would fall below the minimum funding level needed to maintain basic operations.

The education department then decided it needed to adjust its allocation methodology. In order to insure that all schools received at least a base allocation amount (actually 86 percent of the amount the department labeled “operating threshold”), other unrestricted funding was added to the pool to be allocated and the amount of funds that could be reallocated from any school was capped at 3 percent. This cap allows overfunded schools (in fair student funding terms) to remain overfunded. With the additional funding and the cap on reallocation in place, this year’s opening allocations were set by reducing the result under the FSF formula by 4 percent across the board and then using federal stimulus funds as needed to reach a final cut of not more than 4.2 percent in the total SAM#1 allocation—including dollars in addition to the FSF funds—for every school.