Union leaders testify at hearing on public school funding

The fight over the future of Foundation Aid is poised to be one of the biggest issues facing state lawmakers next year, and it’s finally leaving the listening stage. On Wednesday, education officials and policy experts offered recommendations for the future of Foundation Aid – the formula the state uses to allocate funding to public schools – during a public hearing hosted by the State University of New York’s Rockefeller Institute of Government. The conversations boil down to deciding how Foundation Aid will provide quality education while not imperiling the state budget, though everyone agrees with one point: There needs to be a new formula. 

In a compromise towards the end of budget negotiations, lawmakers successfully staved off Foundation Aid changes proposed by Gov. Kathy Hochul that would have eliminated “save harmless,” a mechanism guaranteeing that schools wouldn’t see less funding than the year before. In the end, Foundation Aid’s inflationary factor was tweaked rather than overhauled. Most importantly, SUNY’s Rockefeller Institute of Government was tasked with studying Foundation Aid and providing Hochul and lawmakers with a report full of observations and recommendations to mull over ahead of the next legislative session. 

The Rockefeller Institute held five public hearings across the state in preparation, with the last taking place on Wednesday in Guilderland, about a half hour from Albany. This final hearing, which included testimony from heavy hitters like New York State United Teachers President Melinda Person and United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew, echoed much of the sentiment from the previous hearings, Rockefeller Institute President Robert Megna told City & State.

“We had more of the Albany folks that are engaged in the K-12 funding business year to year, but I think there have been recurring themes that have covered the same issues with respect to the Foundation Aid formula, and I think we did learn a lot,” he said.

Now Megna and the Rockefeller Institute will integrate the testimony they received with reams of data and observations from across the country to come up with a formula that can address issues that differ by region and sustain New York City public schools – the largest school system in America.

“You have a formula that's supposed to fit somehow the needs for all of those places, and that’s going to be complicated,” Megna said.

Person and Mulgrew stressed the rising needs of schools in their respective regions, and both made it clear that any reduction in funding would come at the worst possible time. 

“It was never intended to be the social safety network that it has now become everywhere, and this is what we are facing,” Mulgrew said. “There is a fear that this process is about figuring out a way to cut school funding. Let's just put this out there.”

Rural school districts located in picturesque vacation locales also expressed frustration at the way their financial picture is viewed by the state, which may underestimate the financial need of struggling schools in towns full of expensive vacation homes.   

Hochul’s proposal sought to allocate school funding in a way that would better account for student populations, but in the process, it would have reduced funding to hundreds of school districts.

“For example, of Long Lakes’ $4.9 million annual budget, only 10% comes from state aid while 71% comes from property taxes, and then they cover the rest with remaining fund balance,” said Roger Catania of the state Board of Regents. “What's going to happen when that's all spent?” 

The Citizens Budget Commission, a conservative-leaning fiscal watchdog, recommended an overhaul of how school aid is targeted, involving tweaks to disbursements that could raise the fiscal floor for districts across the state, with the caveat that some right-sizing was in order.

“Currently, arbitrary floors and ceilings, inadequate data inputs and a failure to properly account for local fiscal capacity result in poor targeting of state aid,” said Stevan Marcus, a research associate at the Citizens Budget Commission.

There are differing feelings about whether or not the study is coming too fast or too soon, but with the convoluted nature of budgeting and school funding, Megna said he is not trying to make anyone’s life more difficult. 

“I don’t think our task is to hand them something that is going to upset how they’re going to put the budget together,” he said. “I think it’s to give them options to think about how this formula needs to be updated to reflect current reality, and then it’s really up to them as policymakers how they want to fund it.”