Chair Lee questions Comptroller on school budget hold harmless policy costs

Moving on to the school budgets and the hold harmless.

So I know on Sunday the DOE chancellor announced that DOE

We would hold initial school budget allocations harmless for 26-27 school year.

The city has been holding initial school budgets harmless in recent years as enrollment has declined citywide.

So I wanted to know if your office has an estimated cost for holding initial school budgets harmless, and will this funding be added at adoption?

Yes, to remind people of the big picture here, we've had a very large drop in enrollment in New York City public schools.

We're down probably a quarter of a million students.

And the budget has gone up every year.

And part of the reason for that mismatch is a policy that was put in place during the pandemic for understandable reasons at the time.

That even if an individual school lost enrollment, you didn't want to cut the budget.

And this was COVID.

There was so much stress on the system that we just wanted to protect schools.

But we're now five or six years after that.

And some of these schools are pretty far off their pre-pandemic enrollment.

But you have schools that are 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 or even 50% off.

And so, wow, the mismatch is getting quite big.

And in effect, it means it's a lot of money per kid that a heavily enrolled school that's overcrowded, which you might think would want more help, is actually getting less per child.

So I believe that we are going to eventually have to resolve this and, frankly, do it pretty soon because of all the strains in our budget.

Not in a way that would shock these schools from one day to the next.

You don't want them to endure catastrophic cuts.

This could be phased in in a fair way that's predictable.

You want to protect services to kids first and foremost.

But we believe that today it's about a $260 million difference.

Again, because we're waiting for this all-important assessment of enrollment that's coming soon, we don't actually have an exact fix for you.

So the number I just offered is really just a guess at this point.

And then to your point about phasing it in, what do you think would be a fiscally responsible way in terms of timeline to phase that?

I'm not sure I would get something specific.

I would be happy with almost any plan to phase it in.

Right now we're just on this indefinite path of allowing greater and greater and greater differences between budget and enrollment.

And I'd be comfortable with any plan that just got people on track.

And, you know, I also have to say, Madam Chair, that we have now 200 schools with under 200 kids in their schools in such a big city with 8 million plus residents.

And that also is a big budget cost there because obviously you have a lot of fixed costs for a school.

Some of these schools are so small, it's not even good for kids.

They can't even field a sports team.

And so I do think that as part of our effort to find savings, we should look at combining more schools.

It's tough.

It has to be done sensitively.

Parents need to be part of the process.

But this, too, is also weighing on the...

system as again we had this mismatch between a growing budget and declining enrollment.

Okay, great.