When New York City public schools reopen on Thursday, any joy at not having to wear a mask or test for Covid-19 will be tempered by a big decline in student enrollment and a looming threat of reduced funding.
(Bloomberg) — When New York City public schools reopen on Thursday, any joy at not having to wear a mask or test for Covid-19 will be tempered by a big decline in student enrollment and a looming threat of reduced funding.
About 1 million students are returning to start the third academic year since the pandemic began, a drop of 70,000 since 2020 and 120,000 over the last five years. Officials in the nation’s largest school system say the trend is expected to continue.
While parents, teachers and education experts offer varied reasons for the enrollment dropoff, the result is that Mayor Eric Adams and the Department of Education moved to cut $469 million from school budgets. The City Council approved the reductions, then on Tuesday passed a nonbinding resolution asking the mayor to tap federal stimulus money to restore the funding amid pressure from parents and education advocacy groups.
“This pandemic has hit not only our city hard, it has hit our entire nation very hard, and we have to deal with some of the realities of that,” Schools Chancellor David Banks said at a town hall in a Brooklyn school on Tuesday. “But once the school year begins, and we see that we have more students in our schools, those schools in fact will get more budget.”
New York City schools are operating on a $38 billion budget for the 2022-2023 year. The district gets more than half of its funding from the city and more than a third from the state, with federal and other money making up about 10%.
More than 400, or one-fifth, of the schools didn’t lose any funding as a result of the city cut, because enrollment either grew or remained stable, Banks said. No teaching jobs were lost, though some may be relocated to schools where student rolls are growing, he said.
Slipping Scores
Still, tighter budgets threaten school programs at a time when students nationwide are suffering from the challenge of learning remotely or while following pandemic procedures.
A report last week from the National Center for Education Statistics found that fourth-grade reading and math scores dropped by the largest margin in more than 30 years over the course of the pandemic. While the deterioration affected students of all races and ethnicities, Black and Hispanic students — who comprise about two-thirds of NYC enrollment — fared the worst.
“All it took was two years to wipe out all of the gains that we had,” Banks said of the scores. He criticized an approach to teaching reading known as “balanced-literacy” and in his remarks highlighted his biggest priority as chancellor: ensuring literacy for every third grader.
School officials this year relaxed Covid protocols by eliminating a requirement for daily health screenings to enter school buildings and halting in-school surveillance testing. Instead, students and staff will receive four home test kits per month.
The city’s education department also no longer mandates all students wear masks, though still strongly recommends doing so.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul on Wednesday said that “we’ll continue everything we can to keep our children safe in schools.” The state sent almost 3 million test kits to private, public and charter schools, and has stocked more than 15 million tests in case of another Covid surge.
Hochul also lifted the mask mandate for public transit and other settings. She received a booster shot targeting the omicron variant, and said at a press conference that “we do believe that we’re in a good place right now, especially if New Yorkers take advantage of this booster.”
Read More: NYC Schools Abandon Covid Health Screenings, PCR Tests
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