Interviews with Faculty Leaders
In an effort to understand how school funding works in NYC public schools, we interviewed our school principals and other administrators, in order to educate ourselves about how school funding is allocated. Conducting these interviews helped us gain a more in depth perspective on how schools use the money they receive from the DOE, and made us aware of the differences and similarities of how NYC public schools use their funding.


Aayan and Bryant | Curriculum and Funding
Aayan and Bryant interviewed Dr. Marmor, the principal of Francis Lewis High School, to discuss how school curriculum is developed and how funding is allocated.

Interview:
Aayan and Bryant: How has the school curriculum been shaping over the years?
“The curriculum in a public high school is the result of a lot of different factors. One of those factors has to do with state requirements for graduation and state mandated curriculums... We hired a consulting group.” There are typically two options for updating school curriculum: buying a pre-made curriculum or developing one yourself. Francis Lewis High School historically developed their own rather than purchasing curriculum from an outside firm.
Dr. Marmor explained, that the consulting group worked with teachers and administrators “for three consecutive summers” to create course curriculum. “We started...training for most of our major core curriculums, like algebra, living environment, chemistry, and global history...So we are able to bring in groups of teachers from every subject every summer and have them look at, modify, change, add, delete, to the curriculum... Creating and developing a curriculum is a never-ending, fluid process.”
In New York City, “[t]he burden used to be on teachers. And it was their responsibility to create...a curriculum.” That responsibility has “shifted to administrators” within the past 5 years.
Aayan and Bryant: To what extent are teachers encouraged to incorporate creativity into the curriculum and what support is provided to foster this creativity?
“People think, well, if you’re providing the curriculum, you’re providing the lessons, no, the curriculum is not the lesson. The curriculum is the guiding document that these lessons are drawn from." Dr. Marmor explained that there is a major difference between curriculum writing and the lesson plan writing, in which teachers “foster and nurture the creativity in the lesson planning."
The curriculum “should be flexible,” allowing for creativity within each teacher's lesson planning. “I understand the thought process that a curriculum could prevent creativity,” but the “curriculum could encourage it...actual creativity lives in the lesson planning.” The “creativity comes in finding creative and interesting ways in which teachers can teach those skills and accomplish the goals of the curriculum...[T]he curriculum should be designed in a way that...creativity is encouraged within the lesson planning not in the curriculum.”
Aayan and Bryant: What exactly dictates how schools are funded?
“In New York City schools, funded by a formula called the fair student funding formula” also abbreviated to FSF. This means that money is allocated per student. Because “the more students you have, the more expenses you have the more teachers you need, and more resources you need.” Students who need additional support get additional funding. A formula called the Bayes Formula takes these things into account and decides how much funding a school receives.
Aayan and Bryant: How do you decide how to spend the funding you control? Are there certain areas of the budget where you are required to spend it?
“Over the recent years principals are given more decision making power and autonomy.” There are “things I am mandated to do.” Ultimately, “I’m only really mandated to pay for one thing, which is the teacher and staff salaries.” The rest of the money is “pretty much within my control, too, to dictate whether it be tutoring resources, computer purchase, after school programs, or even hiring additional support staff.”

Elaine | AP Offerings and Budgets
Elaine discussed AP offerings and school budgets with Dr. Seung Yu, the principal of Stuyvesant High School.

Interview:
Elaine W.: How do you determine which APs are offered at the school?
Dr. Yu: We've offered more than 30 AP courses, and oftentimes [the reasoning] is a combination of factors. One is teacher availability and their expertise to teach the course. Two is just general interest from students. And then three just thinking more about the diversity of our course offerings...to be mindful of whether or not offering a course will help students in terms of their overall experience.
So for example, AP pre-calculus, and AP African American studies, we decided to move forward with those two courses. For pre-calculus, what we discovered is that our curriculum seemed to go much deeper than the AP pre-calculus curriculum, so we thought it would be beneficial to give students that opportunity to get college credit if we're already going beyond...AP pre-calculus. Similar idea with AP African American Studies: we've been trying to... [be] more cognizant of different types of experiences and histories, and we want young people to be exposed to African American Studies. The course was a pilot for College Board and there seemed to be interest in this from the staff and from students who decided to pursue it.
Elaine W.: How difficult is it to offer new classes and to get qualified instructors for them?
Dr. Yu: With teachers, I think there's a few things to consider. New York City, since we start school late, means that the AP curriculum, regardless of whatever it is, is abbreviated. Most schools start in August. We don't start until September, and then AP exams are administered in May. So you're getting two months shorter than most students in terms of being able to go through the entire curriculum.
I think everyone can tell that there’s a lot of material for APs, which is why it’s a college level one course. So for teachers, there's both an interest as well as some trepidation because it’s an abbreviated schedule, and so you have to go through a lot. Also, not everyone wants to teach AP courses, so depending on their philosophy around standardized exams, teachers have different opinions on APs. This lends itself to teachers wanting to teach non-AP courses, like, “No, I'd rather teach electives or other courses that are not necessarily bound by an exam.” So interest in APs varies for teachers.
For us as a school, we're trying to find the right balance of wanting young people to be competitive for higher education institutions. We know right now that a lot of admissions officers really look at advanced placement courses, so we don't want young people to be penalized in any way. But at the same time, we also don't want to be so focused on these exams...when [young people] should be more focused on learning. There are a lot of great electives that I think students should also be interested in.
Another factor that the school considers when offering APS is that when you take an AP course, you're expected to take the AP exam, and the month of May is really challenging for the school because we're running a regular school day whilst administering 30 plus AP exams throughout that month. And because of our high numbers, it's also a space issue.
Elaine W.: What exactly dictates the funding that each school receives from the DOE?
Dr. Yu: School enrollment numbers dictate the funding that we receive and each student, depending on their socioeconomic situation, family situation, to their learning needs, may impact the funding amount. All of that is calculated through the Department of Education of what a school will be allocated.
Additionally, there are a variety of funding sources, but for the federal, state and city level, the funding that a school receives could be for a variety of initiatives or different bodies of work that are either required or expected of schools. So the funding really is predicated on a variety of things such as student population, total enrollment numbers, and whatever funding sources that are then going to require schools to meet certain requirements to get that funding.
Elaine W.: Does the DOE dictate how you have to use the money you receive?
Dr. Yu: It depends. We don't physically have the money. It's in a system where we can see how much money we have. The Department of Education has a system in which schools can view what the allocation is, and what the source is. And each of these sources of funding typically can be used...only in certain ways. While it's not dictated to us explicitly at times, it's somewhat dictated because some funding sources can only be used to pay the personnel, buy supplies, or provide training sessions. So there are some categories in that. So the funding is somewhat dictated based on the funding source.
Elaine W.: With the funding that you can control, where does it go other than just necessities?
Dr. Yu: Fair student funding is the funding source that's got the most flexibility, meaning that it can be used for personnel or other things and services. Not every funding source is equated, and when you pay personnel the money may not be the full equivalency, meaning that when you have to pay someone, there's what you call fringe. Fringe is usually for benefits like pension and all those different things that have to have money added to them.
So some funding sources require that your dollar doesn't go the full dollar. For example, if you got $10,000 its value might only be worth $7000 because $3000 has to be set aside for fringe...Schools have to be smart about how they extend the value of their funding, so with fair student funding, in most schools it will be used for personnel because $10,000 becomes $10,000 and doesn’t have this fringe complication.
If we used other funding sources for paying personnel, it wouldn't have the full value, so you typically use the less flexible funding for supplies or services. As a school, you have to be intentional about understanding the funding source. What are some of its limitations and or restrictions, and then what's the full value that you're going to be able to get out of it so that you can stretch your resources?
Elaine W.: How are these decisions for how the money is spent decided on?
Dr. Yu: It’s a year long kind of process because you're always working alongside the district office, who also have on their end their own budgetary people. We work internally with our staff, mostly with the assistant principals, our leadership team, the Student Leadership team, and a variety of other individuals.
But realistically, the vast majority of the funding we receive is already set, because you have things that you always need to spend money on. For instance, we know that we're going to administer placement exams in May, so in the month of May, we're running a regular school day while also administering these exams. So we have to be able to get substitute teachers to be able to help with the testing and there's a certain amount of money that we have to allocate in preparation for that.
We know that we also will always need school paper, right? So we've got to allocate a certain amount of money for that too. So not everything requires a panel of people. We've been fortunate that we can work with our parents association and alumni to figure out how to spend money in places that need more input. But I think again, going back to it, it's a lot of upkeep and maintenance of the things that you know you’re going to need. So oftentimes, it really is predicated on what you actually have available, whatever the restrictions are. A good example I'll give is smart boards. We made a decision that we were going to ensure that every classroom had a working smart board, because when I first got here, very few classrooms had one, so we had to make a decision around if we wanted to allocate an amount of money for this initiative.
Elaine W.: Could you go into more detail about participatory budgeting and how it works?
Dr. Yu: So I'm sorry if I don't know this fully, but I think participatory funding is a new initiative...particularly through our civics education and our social studies department, [where] we either are chosen to participate or we applied to participate...I think the exercise is that you're often going to have much more needs than you have supply. And so then how do you go about making decisions when you have a fixed amount of resources, but you have a number of problems and issues that need to be resolved. What does that mean to be able to get input from your constituent groups? And then how do you work as a collective body to then ultimately make some hard decisions around these trade offs?

Josh | Quality Resources for Migrant Students
Josh interviewed Mr. Amin Perdomo, a counselor at A. Phillip Randolph High School to get his perspective on the resources available to migrant students in NYC.
Interview:
Josh: What have you observed about resource allocation for migrant students?
Mr. Perdomo's key points:
- There’s more than adequate resources for migrant students like:
- A variety of clothing, especially brand name gear to help them assimilate better with their peers.
- It’s not only indispensable clothing either there's purses, sports bras etc.
- They’re fed two meals a day by the school and the counselors provide them with extra food as well.
Josh: In your opinion, are the resources adequate?
Mr Perdomo was skeptical of manner in which schools decide what classes migrant students get placed in. His key points:
- If a migrant carries with them their school records they can get placed based off where they're schooling was interrupted.
- However, if they don’t have the necessary documents, they’re placed in the 9th grade, and the school sees where they go from there (instead of taking an entrance exam).
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Migrant students then meet with a counselor assigned them based on their grade level.
Josh: What kind of resources do you believe are most beneficial to migrant students?
Mr Perdomo:
- The accommodation they actually need is a job.
- It's difficult for migrant students to acquire jobs without working papers and the programs needed.
Josh: Do you believe the handling of migrant students was the most effective manner in implementing them into NYC DOE schools?
Mr. Perdomo's analysis:
- The Mayor could’ve let the migrants in more gradually
- Mr. Perdomo is concerned that the sudden and direct outpouring of resources towards migrants in general is causing animosity towards them from other marginalized groups, who go heavily ignored year by year.
- The resentment exacerbates the hate and the entire situation feels like an endless loop.
Josh: What concerns do you have for their future?
Mr. Perdomo: English
Josh: Are dual language classes preparing migrant students for the rigor of schooling after high school?
Mr Perdomo:
- A lot of their success depends on the student, if they don’t want the education it’s not gonna really work.


David and Bryan | Surveying Budget Decisions and Curriculum Development
David and Bryan interviewed their faculty about how budget and curriculum decisions are made within their schools. David interviewed Mr. Shindana Montague and Mr. Jon Sebastian-Walkes from Democracy Prep Harlem Charter School, while Bryan interviewed two faculty members from Manhattan/ Hunter Science High School who chose to remain anonymous. Compare the answers they received below.