Targeting Our Funding to the Needs of Our Students
Dear New Yorkers,
I am truly energized by the progress we can make for our students when we partner with our families and communities. A great example is our recent proposal to improve our primary local funding stream for our schools, known as our Fair Student Funding (FSF) formula.
FSF funds on average, approximately two-thirds of our schools’ budgets, and it’s based on the number of students enrolled at each school and the students’ specific needs. It intentionally takes students’ needs into account, “weighting” students’ needs to determine how much each school requires to effectively serve its students.
Last year, I convened the Fair Student Funding Working Group to study the formula and make recommendations for ways to improve it. The group released its report in November of 2022, and last week Mayor Adams and I announced proposed improvements, with a focus on equity and targeting investments to our students’ needs.
These are the most important changes we are proposing:
- An additional weight for students in temporary housing to schools serving these students, including recent asylum-seeking students. This is a groundbreaking shift in how schools allocate resources to public school students. This change is expected to drive approximately $45 million in funding impacting students in temporary housing across all five boroughs.
- An additional weight for schools that serve higher concentrations of students with needs, including students in poverty, students with disabilities, and English language learners. This is expected to drive over $45 million in funding to schools in all five boroughs.
- A commitment to ensuring the budget-appeals process is responsive to special-education programming needs. We will refine the process that schools follow to request additional funding in order to prioritize staffing investments that allow students with disabilities to learn in a general education setting.
- Improving transparency in our budget and budget process. We received feedback that not just FSF, but our budget and our budget process are inaccessible and hard to understand. I’ve asked my team to work on increasing information and transparency in a variety of ways.
These changes are another way we are working to make community and families our true partners—and prioritizing the needs our students. And I want to be clear that these proposed changes will not come from reducing other weights in the FSF formula.
I am so grateful to the Fair Student Funding Working Group for their thoughtfulness and dedication in taking on this important effort, and I want to shout out the co-chairs Dia Bryant and Jasmine Gripper.
As we move these recommendations forward, we’re another step closer to creating a school system that puts all students on the path to bright futures—by making sure we’re using our funding in ways that have the biggest impact where our needs are the highest.
Soaring high,
David C. Banks
Chancellor