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Budget alternatives

City Limits Magazine


Winter 2008:
Sizing Up NYC's Dropout Challenge

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Helen Zelon
Helen Zelon
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The Independent Budget Office, which evaluates the mayor’s budget, proposes a series of cost savings and revenue-generators that can restore funding slated to be cut. For example, the IBO advocates eliminating DOE-funded transportation for general-education, non-public-school students: 128,000 students who attend private and parochial schools still receive free Metrocards for schoolday travel, and more than one-third of the yellow buses contracted by the DOE for student transportation are used to ferry children to and from schools outside the public system. Eliminating DOE transportation support for this group would save over $40 million – but achieving it would require a change in state law.

(The student Metrocard itself is a hot potato, as the MTA threatens to withdraw the agency’s support for students as its own cost-cutting strategy. Students across the city say they won’t be able to afford to get to school without the Metrocards. And the very architecture of school choice, a signature of the Bloomberg administration, is threatened if students must pay for transportation.)

Juvenile incarceration costs the city approximately $100 million a year, with an $84,000 average annual cost per child. Moving only 200 children from incarceration to alternative placements would net a $15 million savings – and benefits that can’t be as easily quantified, like a recidivism rate that’s two-thirds lower for youth in alternative programs compared with those in institutional settings (16 percent versus 50 percent).

Increasing class size by two students per class would yield nearly a quarter-billion in savings, according to the IBO. It would also lead to a loss of more than 2,300 teaching positions, making this change an unlikely possibility – as it would require revision of the Contracts for Excellence, the teacher’s contract and the Chancellor’s Regulations. But it’s one way to save $250 million, realistic or not.