Judge Lyle Frank of the NY State Supreme Court granted plaintiffs to a lawsuit against the City a temporary restraining order (TRO) on Friday, July 22, which precludes the Adams administration from temporarily, at least, making any further cuts to the public schools’ budget. The court also ordered that school spending remain at Financial Year 2022 budget levels.

 

Last month, the City Council approved a budget deal, cutting school budgets based on declining enrollment projections. According to reporting by Chalkbeat, the city’s public schools (excluding charters) have lost 9.5 percent of their students since the pandemic began. During 2020 and 2021, the impact of the declining numbers was cushioned by the availability of federal stimulus dollars.

 

With such a stimulus likely drying up, the Adams administration took the decision to make the education budget cuts in a return to pre-pandemic policy processes. The cuts were expected to cause increases to class sizes, the loss of teachers, and the cutting of enrichment programs.

 

The move prompted a lawsuit which has been brought against the City by Tamara Tucker and Melanie Kotler, individually, and on behalf of all parents and guardians of New York City public school students, and Paul Trust and Sarah Brooks, individually, and on behalf of all similarly situated public school teachers, according to court documents.

 

The plaintiffs’ legal representatives said the judge has allowed the City to submit arguments in writing in opposition to the TRO on Monday, July 25. Meanwhile, the plaintiff’s attorney, Laura Barbieri, is to respond to the City’s argument on Tuesday. The case, itself, will be heard in court on Aug. 4 at 10 a.m. The entire court order can be read here.

 

According to the plaintiffs, as detailed in the lawsuit, New York State education law includes a mandated process whereby the NYC Board of Education (also known as the Panel for Educational Policy) must vote to approve each year’s education budget prior to the City Council voting on it.

This year, the City Council voted to adopt the budget on June 13, ten days before the Board voted on June 23. The lawsuit calls for a revote by the City Council in order to ensure, what the plaintiffs say is the legally required process, is followed and to also ensure that the Council has the opportunity to reconsider its vote. The plaintiffs say such reconsideration should be based on the testimony of nearly 70 parents and teachers who they say spoke out at a Board of Education meeting, detailing “the profoundly damaging impact of the budget cuts on their schools.”

 

In addition, the plaintiffs say that State law also requires that the Board of Education votes on a budget in which the expenses of the Community School District Councils are delineated separately from the expenses of the City Board. They say this did not occur either this year.

 

“The TRO is now in place, and Court has granted a hearing date in court,” said Barbieri, an attorney with Advocates for Justice, a group which is handling the case pro bono on behalf of four parents and teacher plaintiffs. “We continue to believe that the cuts are causing irreparable harm to students and teachers,” Barbieri added. “We hope to win this case on the merits, as the cuts were enacted in a manner that clearly violates State law.”

 

According to Chalkbeat, the cuts impact the pool of money that schools use to hire staff and build out programming for children. “While fewer students in a school may mean they need fewer teachers, less funding can impact new programs or class offerings,” an extract from the Chalkbeat article read.

 

On Wednesday, July 20, Mayor Eric Adams was asked about the possibility of reversing the cuts during a press conference. He replied saying he and City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams had been talking on the matter since before the budget was passed. “There is no agreement thus far,” he said. “I think I’m the last person to say if there’s an agreement or not.”

 

He added, “These are tough decisions, but that’s what is expected. I have to make tough decisions to make sure that, as we deal with this economic crisis our city is facing, that we make the right decision [on funding and services].”

 

The mayor was pressed by reporters, nonetheless, on what would be the fiscal effect if such cuts were reversed. “If the federal dollars run out, and we keep pretending as though those federal dollars are always going to be there, and we’re not getting money from Albany, then all we’re doing is trying to deny the reality that we are facing,” said the mayor. “Those federal COVID dollars are going to run out, but we have even a bigger problem; because of our decrease in enrollment, the federal government may change the funding that we receive.”

 

He continued, “It would be irresponsible if I ignore the real crises we’re having in school funding. I can’t do that because then I’m setting up our city for failure in the future. So we have to be smart. We have to make the right decisions, and it’s not going to be the popular decisions, but we have to make the right financial decisions.”

 

Pressed on the specifics around how school funding is used, he added that there were dollars that were “restricted dollars” for use on particular programs during COVID. “You could only use it on COVID prevention,” he said, before then talking hypothetically about potentially alleviating such restrictions to use federal funding on afterschool programs, for example.

 

“I think there’s flexibility to do that. There are no new dollars. It’s about relieving some of the restrictions on dollars that were allocated already, because principals are given funding to run their schools,” Adams said. “Some of that funding is earmarked for a specific reason. If we could come up with a way of saying, instead of you just having to use it on that specific reason, that you could use it for something else that you want to free you up, that’s the conversation we could have. But people are saying, ‘Are you going [to] find $250 million?’ No, there’s no $250 million to find.”

 

Reacting to the announcement, District 11 City Councilman Eric Dinowitz said, “While I will always fight for more dollars for our schools, we also have to look at long-term solutions to the multiple crises facing our schools. Expanding educational opportunities, providing multiple means of assessment, and fixing our funding formula are just three of the areas we need to immediately address to improve the long-term health of our school system and the educational outcomes of our children.”