Chalkbeat

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deferred budget planning initiative

New York
January 29, 2013

No across-the-board midyear budget cuts, but trimming begins

Schools won't have to cut their budgets this month, but they will have to start tightening their belts and won't be able to sock away any savings for next year. That's what Chancellor Dennis Walcott told principals in an email sent Monday evening, the first to name specific actions the Department of Education is taking to make up for $240 in state school aid sacrificed when the city and teachers union failed to agree on new teacher evaluations earlier this month. Mayor Bloomberg is set to offer details about his plans to close the midyear school budget gap at a press conference later today. But Walcott said the department would absorb enough of the cuts centrally that he would not have to impose cuts of a certain size on each school, as happened several times during the leanest years of the economic recession. Still, he announced several significant policy changes that could cost schools just the same. The department is doubling down on hiring restrictions, blocking schools from hiring substitute teachers, reducing aides' schedules, and seizing funds that principals had set aside in this year's budget for next year.