The Department of Education’s mammoth $41.2 billion budget plan for next year is a whopping third of the entire city’s — but it still won’t be enough, school officials claimed Thursday.
Schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos told the City Council that the DOE still needs “hundreds of millions more” to enact a controversial new class size law, plus additional bucks for Gov. Kathy Hochul’s pending phone ban.
“We also have major expenses looming on the horizon, most significantly compliance with the class size mandate,” she pointedly told councilmembers during a budget hearing.
“This funding and headcount are not currently in the preliminary budget.”
The city will need to hire 4,000 more educators to deal with the new United Federation of Teachers-backed requirement that classroom sizes max out at 20 students for early childhood grades and up to 25 for high school, the chancellor said.
Less enrollment ... no problem for the teachers unions.
