School districts fret over potential changes to Foundation Aid in state budget

New York school districts are blowing past budget deadlines now that the state budget is nearly a month late, and while lawmakers are searching for an equitable solution to Foundation Aid, if they take too long, some schools could be left reeling. 

Gov. Kathy Hochul alluded to updating the Foundation Aid formula for school funding by eliminating its reliance on outdated census data when she announced her “general agreement” for the state budget Monday. The question boils down to whether the state will swap the old formula’s method for determining district needs with a regional cost index, as the state Legislature proposed in its one-house budgets, or opt for Hochul’s proposal of using more recent poverty data and replacing free and reduced lunch rates with data on which students are considered economically disadvantaged. 

State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie have been tight-lipped about which way things are trending, although Stewart-Cousins confirmed to reporters Tuesday that negotiations over Foundation Aid are still ongoing.

In the short term, school districts in New York need to hold votes to approve their budgets for the upcoming school year by May 20. There’s hope that the state budget could be voted on as early as this week, but districts had benchmarks to meet even before that. 

Districts, other than those in small cities, were supposed to distribute ballots to members of the military on April 25. They were supposed to send a “property tax report card” to the state Education Department on Monday and are supposed to hold budget hearings between May 6 and May 13 while making copies of the budget available to voters upon request up to two weeks before the budget vote. 

School districts know better than to expect an on-time state budget, but if the state ends up sending them significantly less than their projections, which are based on last year’s school aid disbursements, they’ll be in a pickle. 

“It could be very significant, I’m aware of a district that because of the replacement of the poverty measures, would get like $500,000 less than under current law, and so they're hopeful that something would be done to benefit them, to offset that impact,” said Robert Lowry, the deputy director for advocacy, research and communications for the state Council of School Superintendents. 

In New York City, the difference between expected and received school aid could differ by as much as $350 million based on city Department of Education projections. While lawmakers are signaling districts should make conservative estimates in their budget planning – running with the roughly $37 billion the governor plans to allocate, which includes $140 million more than she originally proposed – there are still concerns among educators and advocates., 

“While an overhaul of the outdated formula is sorely needed, the current proposal makes matters worse — shortchanging NYC students as a result,” said Kim Sweet, executive director of Advocates for Children of New York.