Foil: Your right to Know.
“The main formula used by Albany to distribute money to New York’s school districts — we’re talking $24.9 billion for the new school year — could finally be facing a major overhaul, or at least some nips and tucks.
The $24.9 billion represents 10.5% of the entire state budget and is more than 23 states’ entire budgets.
So if you have something to say about school funding in New York, now is the time.
The Albany-based Rockefeller Institute of Government is doing a major study of New York’s much-debated “Foundation Aid” formula. The formula is supposed to disperse state aid in such a way as to reduce inequities among school districts with different abilities to raise local property taxes for education.
The Rockefeller Institute, a think tank that is part of SUNY, will hold the first of five public hearings this summer about the Foundation Aid formula on July 16 at the High School of Fashion Industries in Manhattan. None of the hearings are in Westchester, Rockland or Putnam counties, but each will be livestreamed on the Rockefeller Institute website. In addition, New Yorkers can send written comments to the Rockefeller Institute website through Sept. 6.
For years, critics have said the Foundation Aid formula is badly out of date and needs to be modernized. For instance, student poverty rates are calculated using data from the 2000 Census. The formula has also been taken to task for not reflecting the modern costs of educating students with special needs and those learning English.
But when the Legislature fought off Gov. Kathy Hochul’s proposal in the spring to cut Foundation Aid to half of New York’s school districts, one compromise was $2 million being set aside in the state budget for a Rockefeller Institute study.
The Rockefeller Institute is supposed to present options to Hochul and legislative leaders by Dec. 1, weeks before Hochul presents her budget proposal for next year.
Goal is to deliver more aid to needy districts
The Foundation Aid formula was devised in 2007 after the state Court of Appeals found that New York was not funding a “sound, basic education” for all students. It was designed to drive more state aid to needier school districts by weighing factors like a district’s poverty, educational costs, local property values and regional costs like labor.
The formula was compromised in numerous ways, and underfunded by the state, before the Legislature succeeded in securing huge increases in Foundation Aid over three years from 2021-22 to 2023-24.
Hochul, who agreed to those increases, sought to slam on the brakes in 2024-25. She proposed cutting Foundation Aid to over 300 of New York’s nearly 700 school districts, an abrupt change that would have erased a policy that prevented districts from receiving year-to-year cuts in aid. But the Legislature fought back and eliminated any cuts.
Now the goal is to improve the Foundation Aid formula itself so that it better measures districts’ needs.
State Sen. Shelley Mayer, D-Yonkers, chair of the Senate education committee, helped begin a major review of Foundation Aid in 2019 that was undercut by the pandemic. She’s anxious to see what the Rockefeller Institute comes up with.
“A lot of the frustration we heard with the formula is still relevant,” Mayer said. “I don’t think the formula needs to be rewritten top to bottom, but the (measurements) of need have to be updated.”
So many factors must be measured
Mayer said the formula must better measure the costs of educating students with special needs and those learning English — major costs in growing numbers of districts. It needs a better measure of student poverty than the percentage of students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch and more accurate measures of regional costs that districts face, she said.
The formula should better weigh district’s capital and environmental needs, including electric school buses and air conditioning, she said.
And Mayer said the formula ought to consider individual circumstances that devastate many districts, like losing a major taxpayer or facing a court-ordered tax refund to a large company.
“I encourage parents and PTAs and taxpayers and everyone who cares about public education to make their voices known,” she said.”
Read the complete Journal News coverage here.
