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Funding pinches education citywide

By Scott Hensley, Staff Reporter

City schools are caught in a three-way funding squeeze, and education advocates say a perennial shortfall in state aid and the wave of recent city cuts are straining the school's capacity to cope.

"There is just so much tightening you can do," said Joseph Kovaly, superintendent for Community School Board 11. "The fat's been cut out and now we're into muscle and bone."

The pressure is coming from:

* Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's proposal to cut $350 million from the city's share of school funding

* Gov. George Pataki's plan to freeze education support

* State formulas that allocate less than 35 percent of aid to the city, even though 37 percent of the state's students attend city schools. That gap translates to $263 million this school year, according to figures from Schools Chancellor Ramon C. Cortines' office.

"It's shocking that the kids with the greatest educational needs are getting the least resources," said Noreen Connell, executive director of the Educational Priorities Panel, one of many advocacy groups pushing for a larger share of aid for city school children.

"I don't think people understand that there are decisions made in Albany every year that worsen the situation for kids in the South Bronx," he said.

Two years ago, Connell's group joined a half-dozen other advocacy organizations, and almost half the city's school boards in a lawsuit against the state. They argued that Albany's system for distributing school aid racially discriminates against New York City, which teaches almost three-quarters of the minority pupils in the state.

The consortium lost that case, but appealed it. A ruling is expected soon.

"Our main claim is that students in New York City are not only getting less money than kids upstate, but by any objective standard they are getting fewer resources than are necessary to get a minimum adequate education," said Michael Rebell, lawyer for the consortium, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity. The group includes Community School Boards 10 and 11, which serve Belmont, East Tremont and Westchester Square, among other neighborhoods.

The lawsuit faults the state for failing to provide enough money for city schools to meet state standards. The city spent a total of nearly $6,800 a student during the 1992-93 school year, while suburban schools spent more than $9,300, according to a state education department report. Last school year, 41 percent of city third-graders and 38 percent of sixth-graders failed to meet state reading standards.

Superintendent Kovaly said schools in District 11 have striven to keep cuts out of the classroom, although the number of guidance counselors and social workers has been reduced as demand for their services had climbed.

Some charge that quirks in the aid formulas are less of a problem than annual deal-making in Albany that divides aid according to political whim.

"The problem is always that somebody wants to bring home money and unless the courts tell them that this isn't the way it's going to be, they're going to continue with it," said Albert Chase, head of the revenue unit at the Board of Education.


The Bronx Beat, April 17, 1995