Long Island schools will not face funding cuts, but the entire school aid formula is under review according to the tentative budget deal announced by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul.
School aid will be increased to almost $40 billion. The guarantee that each school district gets at least as much funding as the year before remains intact for now, but Hochul said lawmakers agreed to a comprehensive review of the formula used to determine how much aid goes to individual districts. The study will be carried out by the state Department of Education and the Rockefeller Institute of Government.
"They'll track down where the money is going to waste and how we can get every student the resources they need to learn, to thrive and succeed," Hochul said at a news conference announcing the tentative deal.
She said the formula used to allocate aid to each individual district is outdated because student enrollment has dropped 10% over the last decade.
“It just doesn't make sense to keep paying for empty seats in classrooms," Hochul said. We can’t continue to have large sums of money sit in school district reserves, when that money could be used in helping students in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color, or return it to the taxpayers.”
Lawmakers from both parties had criticizedthe governor’s previous education proposal, which would have cut funding to dozens of Long Island districts.
