Mayor Bill de Blasio, Speaker Johnson and Schools Chancellor Porter have announced a historic investment to bring 100 percent “Fair Student Funding” (FSF) for all New York City public schools funded by FSF for the first time ever, starting in the 2021-22 school year.
This investment represents the administration’s commitment to bring all schools to 100 percent FSF once the State met their Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) funding mandate. For decades, the City was short changed over a billion dollars a year in State funding, but funds were included
in the State’s recent enacted budget after years of advocacy the de Blasio Administration, the City Council, and in partnership with Majority Leader Stewart-Cousins, Speaker Heastie and members of the State Legislature.
FSF is the primary source of funding for individual school budgets. It is driven by equity and specifically drives more resources to schools that serve students with higher needs, such as students requiring academic intervention, students with disabilities, and multilingual learners.
Principals can use FSF at their discretion and it is mainly used to hire teachers and staff, as well as to purchase materials and educational resources to support school communities. This builds on the administration’s unprecedented investments in education and will help ensure every single school has the resources needed to support their students and staff during these challenging times. The FSF “floor” has been continuously raised under this administration, with investments totaling $1.6 billion to raise the FSF floor from 81 percent in 2014 to now 100 percent for the first time ever. More than half of DOE schools have seen additional funding as a result of these investments. With this new investment, the FSF formula will be fully funded, after years of partial funding for most schools. No school will receive less than the full amount they are entitled to under the FSF
formula. At the beginning of the de Blasio administration, some schools received only 81 percent of the amount they were entitled to under the FSF formula. Under this administration, the floor had grown to 90%, with the average school receiving 93% of formula. This new investment
mpacts 1,164 schools and over 700,000 students in every borough and community school district.
See the press release for details, and read more in Chalkbeat NY here.
