How Would Chancellor Klein's Fair Student Funding (FSF) Proposal Affect MCSM?

Perhaps you have never heard of Fair Student Funding, or FSF? It is the name Chancellor Klein has given to the DOE’s Children First program to change the way budgets are determined for all of the City’s public schools. The old budgeting program was very complex, and few people understood it. The DOE has claimed that the old system was unfair, that similar schools with similar numbers of students often did not receive the same budgets. The new program bases each school’s budget more strictly on the number of students in the school, their family income backgrounds, and whether they are regular education students, special education, or English language learners.

Chancellor Klein has approved this new budgeting system, but he does not plan to implement it until 2009. In the meantime, however, the DOE has begun recalculating what each school’s budget would have been under this new system (even though the old budgets will still be used for one or two more years). So what would happen to MCSM’s budget under of the program?

To understand the effect of FSF, it helps to know that MCSM’s operating budget for 2006/2007 was nearly $9,100,000. About $920,000 of this money came from sources outside the NYC DOE, mostly from the Federal Government under the Title I and Title III programs. Thus, MCSM’s budget allocation from the DOE was about $8,200,000.

Under the Chancellor’s FSF budgeting rules, MCSM’s budget for 2007/2008 would have been cut by $426,649. In other words, the DOE is saying the MCSM has been being overfunded by this amount (5.2% of our 2006/2007 budget allocation from DOE) and getting more money than it deserved! The same result is occurring in a number of District 4 (East Harlem) schools.

What does this mean for MCSM? It means that none of the billions of dollars awarded to New York City schools from New York State as a result of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit will go to MCSM in the next two years. Those funds will supposedly go instead to schools whose budgets appear underfunded based on the FSF rules. According to the Chancellor, schools like MCSM whom the DOE says are overfunded will be “held harmless” for the next two years, meaning that their budgets will be left the same as before, without the “overfunding” being taken away. Note, however, that the Chancellor has said nothing about what will happen in 2009/2010 and beyond. Under the FSF formulas, the DOE could reduce MCSM’s budget later by at least the $426,000 (depending on the school’s student population two years from now). That’s the equivalent of salaries and benefits for somewhere around 5 – 7 full-time teachers.

Our budgetary situation is potentially further complicated by the fact that we are required to requalify as a Title I school this fall. In 2004, MCSM families were required to fill out family income forms and 62% of our families qualified under the Title I guidelines. Since 60% was the minimum level for our school to qualify, we did not have much room to spare. If this fall we fail to have enough qualifying families to continue in Title I, MCSM will lose over $880,000 more from its annual budget. Thus, depending on how the DOE plans to implement FSF in 2009/2010, our school could be operating with $1.3 million less than it does now – not a bright prospect.

Parents, you need to stay aware of this issue. We will try to keep you informed on this blog site and through the Parent Newsletter as more news comes out of the DOE.