Senators support education budget

State Senators Frank Padavan and Serphin Maltese have agreed to support Governor Eliot Spitzer’s education budget following a series of rallies sponsored by the Alliance for Quality Education (AQE) and the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE).
Speakers at a packed rally at Queens Borough Hall on Thursday, March 8 claimed that the fate of the City’s schoolchildren lay with these two Republican Senators.
According to Billy Easton, executive director of the AQE, their support for the proposed education budget would create a tied vote and allow Lieutenant Governor David A. Paterson to cast the deciding vote in favor of the budget.
Geri Palast, executive director of the CFE said that the governor’s plan would increase state aid to New York City schools by $3.2 billion over the next four years and create a fair and equitable school aid formula based on need while establishing groundbreaking new accountability standards. Several speakers reiterated that the Assembly has supported the premise of formula-based reform in recent years but the Senate has not.
The goal of the rally was to encourage concerned parents and educators to lobby the two Republican senators from Queens to break from Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno - who has been widely reported as describing the governor’s education budget as class war waged on wealthy suburbanites - and vote for the increase in funding for New York City schools. Both houses are addressing these bills this week and the budget must be finalized by April 1.
Both Senators agreed that Spitzer’s budget plan was a good one and that its funding level should be seen as a minimum. “The CFE knows my record of fighting for education funding for New York City schools,” Padavan said. “I’m also fighting to retain $330 million in discretionary grants to the city, a good proportion of which would go on education.”
The budget also directs money to research-tested programs that improve academic achievement - the critical issue of reducing class size, full day pre-kindergarten, time-on-task programs like after-school programs, teacher quality initiatives and middle school and high school restructuring.