On Wednesday, January 29, Policy and Advocacy Associates Caitlyn Passaretti and Jenny Veloz submitted testimony to the New York State Joint Legislative Executive Budget Hearing on Elementary Education and Secondary Education. On behalf of CCC, the testimony focused on increasing funding to schools and school districts, including critical considerations in updating funding formulas, as well as ensuring the inclusion of universal school meals in the FY26 Adopted Budget. Our state leaders must ensure that education opportunities are equitably funded across New York so all students are appropriately supported during their education journey. 

Read the testimony below.

Testimony of Caitlyn Passaretti and Jenny Veloz
Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York  

Submitted to the New York State FY26 Joint Legislative Budget Hearing
on Elementary and Secondary Education
January 29th, 2025 

Since 1944, Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York has served as an independent, multi- issue child advocacy organization dedicated to ensuring every New York child is healthy, housed, educated, and safe. CCC does not accept or receive public resources, provide direct services, or represent a sector or workforce; our priority is improving outcomes for children and families through civic engagement, research, and advocacy. We document the facts, engage and mobilize New Yorkers, and advocate for solutions to ensure the wellbeing of New York’s children, families, and communities.  

We would like to thank Chairs Pretlow and Krueger, as well as Chairs Mayer, Benedetto, and Liu, and all the members of the Assembly Ways and Means, Senate Finance, Senate and Assembly Education Committees, and the Senate’s New York City Education Committee for holding today’s Joint Hearing and allowing us the opportunity to respond to Governor Hochul’s Executive Budget.  

Equity in Schools and School Funding 

We appreciate that in 2023 the State began fully funding the Foundation Aid formula for the first time. However, the formula itself includes outdated and incomplete measures of need and has not evolved to account for growing costs, particularly in large urban districts like New York City. As you consider changes to the formula for FY 2026, we join partners within the Coalition for Equitable Education Funding (CEEF) in urging you to ensure it reflects the true cost of providing a sound basic education to today’s students and accounts for the tremendous variation in the cost of living across different regions of New York State.  

We support the Governor’s proposal to replace the flawed “free and reduced-price lunch” metric with a broader measure of “economically disadvantaged students” that will more accurately capture the number of students from low-income families. However, we are very concerned by the Executive Budget’s proposed changes to the formula’s poverty metric. While we agree with the Governor that New York should not be relying on data from the 2000 Census, we disagree that it should be replaced with the most recent three-year average Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE),as the Executive Budget proposes. This change would result in New York City schools receiving $392 million less than they otherwise would in a time when families are facing immense economic hardship. SAIPE is based on the federal poverty threshold, which is currently just $32,150 for a family of four and it makes no adjustments for the local cost of living. Surviving on $32,000 looks very different in the five boroughs than it does in a rural community upstate, and therefore we urge the Governor to not change to the SAIPE metric. 

Furthermore, we are particularly concerned that the State would move forward with the update to the poverty weight without also updating the Regional Cost Index—as recommended by the NY State Board of Regents and the Rockefeller Institute—which is supposed to account for differences in wages in different parts of the State but is nearly two decades out of date.  

The State should also be looking at additional factors to better capture the needs of students in NYC and around the State, including adding a weight for students in temporary housing and students in foster care. To further address the inadequacies of the Governor’s proposed poverty metric, the State could also consider using differentiated weights for different concentrations of poverty, as recommended by the Rockefeller Institute, and adding a new cost-of-living adjustment, among other possibilities. 

While the Executive Budget only includes changes related to the weights for low-income students and students living below the federal poverty threshold, we continue to call on the State to make the following additional changes to the Foundation Aid formula to help ensure schools can meet the needs of all students: 

• Replace the outdated “successful school district model” that has formed the base of the formula. This model is based on the narrow view that successful school districts are those where students perform well on standardized tests, with insufficient consideration to the needs of large urban districts. The State must ensure the new base rate reflects the actual cost of providing the academic, social-emotional, and holistic supports students need to succeed in school, including in large urban districts, with particular attention to students from low-income backgrounds, students with disabilities, English Language Learners, students who are homeless, and students in the foster system.  

• Add a per-pupil weight for students in temporary housing and students in the foster system. More than 119,000 New York City students—roughly one in every nine—experienced homelessness in 2022–23 (the most recent year for which data are available), and 6,800 students spent time in the foster system. At present, the Foundation Aid formula does not provide any additional funding to help schools support these student populations, both of whom face tremendous obstacles to success in school and have educational needs distinct from those of all students in poverty.  

• Increase the weights for students with disabilities and ELLs to ensure they reflect the cost of providing legally required, high-quality classes, services, and supports and are adequate to address the wide spectrum of student needs. This includes considering differentiated weights by program to better account for the tremendous diversity within both groups of students, neither of which is a monolith.   

• Update the Regional Cost Index to better reflect the rising costs of salaries and services. This metric has been fixed since 2006 and is thus significantly out of date, particularly given increased expenses in New York City.   

• Provide resources to implement the State’s new class size requirements. The New York City Independent Budget Office (IBO) has estimated that NYCPS will need between $1.6 and $1.9 billion annually to achieve full compliance with the law by the 2028 deadline, given the significant hiring needs associated with reducing class size—yet the State has allocated no additional funding to help NYCPS meet this legislative mandate, which applies to New York City alone.  

• Include funding for students in 3-K and Pre-K, as well as students with disabilities through the school year they turn 22. Over the past decade, New York City has dramatically expanded access to early childhood education. The Foundation Aid formula, however, only covers grades K–12, a holdover from an earlier era in which a child’s educational career was typically thought to begin at age five or six. Numerous studies have demonstrated the long-term benefits of high-quality preschool, and the Foundation Aid formula should be updated to reflect the needs of a unified P–12 system. In addition, the State recently affirmed that districts have a legal obligation to provide special education programs and services to students with disabilities until they turn 22 if they have not yet graduated, but the Foundation Aid formula does not provide funding for these students. 

Our Collective Call for an Equitable Foundation Aid Formula that Meets Students’ Needs is available online. 

Finally, we emphasize that the State cannot let another 15-plus years pass before it next revisits Foundation Aid. Given the complex nature of the formula itself and the ever-changing needs of our public schools, ongoing review of the formula by independent experts and stakeholders will be essential to ensure it incorporates adequate, up-to-date measures of student need and provides equitable funding to districts across the State.

Universal School Meals 

Investments in many federal hunger prevention programs have lapsed, leaving children and families struggling to afford healthy meals and groceries. According to the State Comptroller’s May 2024 report on food insecurity, from 2020-2022, 11.3% households in New York State experienced food insecurity, an increase from 10.3% during the period of 2019-2021. This same report also touched upon the fact that households with children continue to experience the highest rates of food insufficiency when compared to households without children. In 2022, 16 percent of households with children experienced food insufficiency. Although that number decreased to 15.1% in 2023, it was still higher than the 10% of households without children. 

New York is also facing looming funding threats from the federal administration, which has made clear its intention to cut funding for vital nutrition programs such as SNAP and free school meals. It has never been more important for New York State to support programs that help families combat hunger. 

We therefore join the Healthy School Meals for All coalition and advocates across the state in applauding Governor Hochul for including full funding for universal school meals as part of her FY26 Executive Budget. This historic investment will expand access to free school meals to an additional 280,000 students in nearly schools across New York.  

Healthy School Meals for All has proven to have wide-ranging benefits. These benefits include improved physical and mental health, increased test scores, academic achievement and school attendance, as well as alleviating food insecurity. Free school meals also provide an economic benefit to families. Families save approximately $165 per child per month when their children have access to free breakfast and lunch in schools, as well as eliminating the stigma attached to “free/reduced” school meals.  

The State Senate and Assembly have championed universal school meals and included full funding in their respective FY2024 and FY2025 one-house budgets. We thank the Legislature for its longstanding, bipartisan advocacy for this critical policy. Now, with the Governor’s support, we urge the Legislature to ensure Healthy School Meals for All is fully funded in the FY2026 Enacted Budget. With strong support from the Legislature and Governor Hochul, this can be the year Healthy School Meals for All becomes a reality for New York’s students. We urge lawmakers to ensure this historic investment is fully funded in the FY2026 Enacted Budget. 

Pre-School Special Education 

New York continues to face a shortage of preschool special education seats, in violation of the legal rights of young children with disabilities. Numerous 4410 preschool special education programs have been forced to close as a result of inadequate salaries. While we are pleased the state will be studying alternative tuition rate-setting methodologies for preschool special education programs, this new methodology will not be implemented for years. It is therefore urgent that the state ensures tuition rates for preschool special education programs and state-approved non-public schools for students with disabilities reflect annual cost increases and inflation. 

We support the Board of Regents’ recommendation for a statutory mechanism that updates preschool special education tuition rates annually by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) until a new rate setting methodology is adopted. We recommend the same annual increase apply to preschool special education evaluations to help address the significant wait times that delay access to critical services for children and families. 

Thank you for your consideration and for your support of students throughout New York State.