$8.4B drained from NY schools since 2010

The Gap Elimination Adjustment, the withholding of state school aid since 2010 because of state budget woes, has drained $8.4 billion from New York's school coffers, the Journal News reported today.

"The GEA is the bane of our existence," said Rick Timbs, executive director of the Statewide School Finance Consortium, which is composed mostly of districts from average and low-wealth communities. "We just see schools as being used as a scapegoat for the state's budget deficit."

The GEA has been knocked by schools for leading to less school aid than was promised years ago.

In 2010, the state began to cut part of the base education funding, known as Foundation Aid, that's doled out yearly to school districts to reduce its own $10 billion deficit, the Journal News said.

From the article:

The annual withholding, which eventually became known as the GEA, was introduced by then-Gov. David Paterson as a short-term deficit-reduction measure. It was enacted following a state freeze on Foundation Aid in 2008-09.

School districts have lobbied hard for Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the Legislature to restore money lost to GEA in the 2014-15 state budget, which is due April 1. Districts are hoping for extra aid as they craft their own budgets.

...

The complaints reached a crescendo recently as Cuomo rolled out his executive budget proposal touting a $2 billion budget surplus -- a key talking point in his 2014 re-election campaign. Critics say the state has run up a big debt to school districts in order to find the surplus.