Your school budget–up close and personal

The Mayor released his planned budget for next year, and perhaps more interesting to us, a new online tool for looking at individual school budgets. This little tool should generate some good questions for your principal.

Ken Lubetsky, UFT’s budget maven, sent the following simple instructions for accessing it.

From Ken: “This morning the DOE added an informative new budget feature to its web site. The steps to access this information are as follows:
(1) First go to the DOE’s main web page at www.nycenet.edu.
(2) Next, scroll down to the Find A School section at the bottom right hand corner of the page.
(3) In the lower box that’s labeled School Name or Number you can type in any school’s code (i.e. P.S. 119X = X119; PS 16R = R016; IS 5Q = Q005; etc.) and click on “Go”. For the first time all District 75 school and alternative high school data is available. [NOTE: District 79 works a little differently. See below.]
(4) The school’s “Home Page” will come up. Along the left hand side of the page there’s a new option called Budget Summary. This summary represents a record of where each school’s allocations have been scheduled to be spent. It is current and is updated nightly.
(5) Directly above this new feature is one labeled Galaxy Budget Allocations. This is a current list of the allocations a school has received to date. By comparing the Galaxy Budget Allocations and the new Budget Summary a viewer can see whether or not all of a school’s available funds have been scheduled.”

If you have trouble understanding their budget terms, click on the “Budget Summary Glossary” highlighted on the left near the top of the page.

Ken adds that to test the new feature, “we looked at a Bronx elementary school’s Budget Summary and Galaxy Budget Allocations. We found there was approximately $12,000 in the Galaxy Budget Allocations that had not yet been scheduled to be spent as reflected in the Budget Summary. This conceivably provides an opportunity for a chapter leader and his/her chapter committee to discuss the use of these funds before they are scheduled.”

He warns:
“I don’t want a reader to conclude that a discrepancy in the received allocations and the spending plan is a sign of something nefarious. It could be as simple as a principal planning to run a spring Saturday or after school program and not having gotten around to scheduling this future expenditure. A discrepancy should lead to the asking of questions. Seeing how funds are being spent should generate a larger discussion about whether or not the school is spending its available resources in the best possible ways. ”

Amy Arundell (UFT budget maven #2) just sent a message that District 79 is accessed slightly differently:
(1) First go to the DOE’s main web page at www.nycenet.edu.
(2) Next, scroll down to the Find A School section at the bottom right hand corner of the page.
(3) In the lower box that’s labeled School Name or Number you can type in any school’s code (i.e. P.S. 119X = X119; PS 16R = R016; IS 5Q = Q005; etc.) and click on “Go”. For the first time all District 75 school and alternative high school data is available.
(4) The school’s homepage will come up. Click on Statistics
(5) Towards the middle of the page you should see Galaxy Budget Allocations and Budget Summary.
(6) Simply click on either link

The overall city budget was also released today: It shows the DOE with a $14.87-billion budget for the 2006-07 year, an increase of $258.8 million from this year. If you have a fondness for tiny print and enormous numbers, just go to nyc.gov and you’ll be able to click on the new budget documents from there. Happy picking.

 Print