A group of New York City parents and teachers filed suit Monday in a bid to stop the Department of Education from slashing school budgets.
The Manhattan Supreme Court suit argues that the city flouted state law by passing a budget that included the hundreds of millions in cuts without approval from the DOE’s oversight board first.
“The explicit language of State law requires that these egregious budget cuts be halted and reconsidered by the Mayor and the Council, because the law was not followed,” said Laura Barbieri, special counsel for Advocates for Justice representing the plaintiffs.
The law mandates that the Panel for Educational Policy — the citywide school board of mostly mayoral appointees — approve a yearly estimated education budget before the City Council vote.
The council, however, voted to adopt the 2023 budget last month — 10 days before the PEP signed off on the education funds.
The lawsuit asks a judge to issue a temporary restraining order to stop the cuts for the next school year from going into effect — and to void the City Council’s budget vote so that the legislative body can reconsider based on the subsequent testimony of more than 70 teachers, parents and organizers.
“We need to use every possible measure to restore the cuts,” said Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, a PEP member appointed to represent Manhattan by the borough president.
“If protests don’t work, if town halls and meetings with the mayor and chancellor don’t work, if City Council asking to re-negotiate the budget don’t work, then we have to use the law to protect our community.”
The legal action comes amid fierce pushback from activists, parents and educators, who want the city to restore the school funding. Advocates heckled Mayor Eric Adams at a public safety event last Monday over the cuts, which he and DOE officials say are necessary due to falling enrollment in city public schools.
The lawsuit, however, may be an uphill battle.
“It’s hard to imagine a judge invalidating the Council vote and putting the city budget in limbo over oft-ignored procedural irregularities,” said David Bloomfield, a professor of education law and policy at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.
Schools Chancellor David Banks in May issued an emergency declaration so the budget could be adopted before the PEP voted on it, the filing states. Several chancellors have involved similar emergencies over the last decade, allowing the City Council to adopt the overall budget before the education panel could vote.
But Barbieri noted that “No emergency justified the Chancellor’s ignoring the proper procedure.”
“The State Legislature enacted an explicit budget review and voting process by the Board of Education that was eviscerated by the Chancellor’s abuse of authority,” Barbieri said in a statement.
The plaintiffs include two parents, in Sunset Park and in Harlem, whose schools are slated to lose certain programs and increase class sizes as a result of the cuts.
“These children will have the rug pulled from under them if these cuts are enacted,” said Leonie Haimson, executive director of the organization Class Size Matters, “and much of the progress they have gained will be lost, in the anonymity of excessive class sizes where their teachers will be unable to give them the academic and social-emotional support they so desperately need.”
The other plaintiffs are DOE employees, including a special education teacher at the same school in Sunset Park, and a music teacher in Park Slope who was let go from the school that is slated to lose its music program.
Adams was confronted again by protesters against the budget cuts on Monday, twice, including on Fulton Street and at an unrelated press conference. One of those groups landed an in-person meeting with him later that afternoon.
But advocates said that because of the pending litigation, they were told that Adams could not fully engage in the conversation about the school cuts tied to enrollment.
“What we want to do through policy choices is prevent ‘enrollment death spiral,’ when you keep reducing the money for schools because of declining enrollment, and that leads to further declining enrollment because the quality of the schools is going down,” Zara Nasir of The People’s Plan, a group of more than 150 advocates, told The Post.
The DOE and city Law Department referred a request for comment to City Hall.
“Since day one, the Adams administration has been committed to uplifting students throughout the five boroughs,” said Jonah Allon, a spokesperson for the mayor, pointing to increased city funding in the DOE’s overall budget.
“While enrollment in public schools dropped, the city has maintained the unprecedented commitment to keep every school from every zip code at 100% of Fair Student Funding,” the primary source of funds for school budgets. “We are reviewing the lawsuit.”
Additional reporting by Bernadette Hogan and Priscilla DeGregory
