The $2.1 billion increase to statewide education funding the state Board of Regents recommended Monday is not likely to have a big effect on North Shore districts, education officials said.
But it is part of a step toward distributing school funding more equitably in a state with still-growing gaps between rich and poor districts, the officials said.
“The state needs to make sure that the aid, the pot of money that’s going to be distributed, is adequate to meet the needs of children throughout the state,” said Joseph Dragone, the assistant superintendent for business in the Roslyn school district. “… In fact, the exact opposite has been happening throughout the state.”
The Board of Regents voted in Albany this week to recommend that Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the state Legislature increase state education funding by a total of $2.1 billion in the next fiscal year.
That includes a $1.47 billion boost to so-called “foundation aid,” which is distributed to school districts according to their levels of wealth and financial need.
That hike would be the first step in a plan the regents recommended to grow that funding pot by $4.3 billion over three years. That would be in addition to roughly $24 billion that the state budgets for education annually.
The increases would fulfill payments the state pledged to make after implementing the foundation aid system in 2007 following a lawsuit over inequitable school funding, but had to put on hold when the financial crisis hit about a year later, said Roger Tilles, a Board of Regents member from Great Neck.
The board also recommended changes to the formula for distributing foundation aid, including the use of different data to measure districts’ poverty levels.
As recommended, the new formula would draw from databases for federal benefit programs rather than each district’s rate of enrollment in free and reduced-price lunch programs. It would also use updated poverty estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau rather than data from the 2000 Census that’s currently used.
The current formula relies on projections based on old data that likely do not match reality, meaning the changes would allow for better distribution of state funds, Dragone said.
“We want a more accurate representation in the formula of, what is poverty,” Tilles said.
The aid boost and formula changes are unlikely to have a large impact on the North Shore, where state aid comprises a small portion of the budgets in affluent school districts, Tilles and Dragone said.
Some districts’ aid levels may stay flat, but the Board of Regents also recommended measures to prevent any district’s aid package from shrinking, Tilles said.
The plan “keeps the relative shares of the state aid going out to districts geographically about the same,” Tilles said.
In a memo containing the aid recommendations, the Board of Regents noted the state cap on property tax increases has limited school districts’ ability to raise revenue locally.
On average, the portion of a school district’s budget covered by state aid has shrunk by more than 10 percent over the past several years, leaving taxpayers to foot more of the bill, Dragone said.
“People are living in the North Shore of Long Island, for example, in very valuable homes, but their incomes haven’t necessarily kept pace,” he said.
Cuomo and the Legislature must approve the Board of Regents recommendations for them to take effect.
In a report published Monday, the Citizens Budget Commission, a New York City-based good-government group, recommended changes to the foundation aid formula that would only boost funding by $569 million annually by giving the wealthiest districts no aid and redistributing it to the poorest.
The state could take a much more aggressive approach to making foundation aid more equitable, Tilles said, but the Board of Regents considers its $2.1 billion request “very aggressive” and is uncertain whether it will get political support in a nonelection year.
“We’re trying to close the gap but keep the levels of state aid for all districts at least not going down,” he said. “We could have a formula that really closes the gap, but it would hurt our districts very much.”
