(Long Island, NY) Yesterday Governor Cuomo told upstate editorial boards that the amount of state school funding the State promised to provide when it enacted the 2007 Foundation Aid Formula was an “outrageously high” number, indicating that he has no intention of fulfilling the promise made by the State in 2007 to satisfy the landmark ruling by New York’s highest court in Campaign for Fiscal Equity that the State must provide enough funding to ensure children have the opportunity for a constitutionally “sound basic education.”
This shocking claim directly contradicts Cuomo’s own declaration of support for the CFE decision when he ran for his first term as governor. In 2010 Andrew Cuomo asserted in the gubernatorial debate that the state needed to fund CFE.
In the October 2010 debate he said, “The way we fund education through the property tax system, by definition is going to be unfair. And it is. The state is supposed to equalize or come close to equalizing with its funding. That’s the CFE lawsuit that the state is yet to fully fund.”
“Governor Cuomo has failed to abide by the State’s obligation to fund Foundation Aid, and our schools are now owed $4.4 billion dollars. In his six years in office, this is the first year Governor Cuomo has proposed even a dime in Foundation Aid in his budget and he only proposed a tiny fraction of the amount that our students are owed,” said Billy Easton, Executive Director Alliance for Quality Education. “In 2010 candidate Cuomo said New York State was still obliged to fund CFE, now Governor Cuomo says he is under no obligation to fund CFE. While the Governor has flip-flopped, our children are the ones he is shortchanging.”
Cuomo’s new claim contradicts the position he took in the Small Cities school funding lawsuit, Maisto v. State, now awaiting decision after trial last year in Albany State Supreme Court.
David Sciarra, Executive Director of The Education Law Center and co-counsel in Maisto, noted that “in an unsuccessful attempt in 2011 to dismiss to Small Cities case without a trial, the Attorney General, on behalf of the Governor asserted that far from being ‘outrageously high,’ the 2007 Foundation Aid formula was specifically enacted ‘to reflect the estimated cost of providing a constitutionally adequate education in this State.’ The Attorney General further declared that the Foundation Aid Formula ‘tracks the formula that th[e] Court [of Appeals] found rational in CFE.’”
