By Michèle De Meglio
Parents have a message for the city Department of Education as it looks for ways to cut corners – fire your consultants. “The consultants that you’re paying millions of dollars to – you have members on the [Community Education] Councils that can do the same job,” asserted James Dandridge, president of District 18’s CEC. “Use the volunteers that you have in the city to act as consultants,” he continued. “That’s a way to save money.” “We spend millions on consultants,” said Victoria Bousquet, a member of the Coalition for Educational Justice (CEJ), an alliance of parent organizations lobbying for improvements to local schools. Bousquet said the DOE should also change how it hires private firms. “If we’re going to look at cutting corners, we need to open up the bidding,” Bousquet said, “instead of handing out the contracts to whoever the Department of Education picks.” District 18 CEC member Nadia Hyppolite wondered why the DOE is cutting school budgets – slashing $180 million this year and $324 million next year – when city schools just won billions from the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case. “Why is there a need to cut when you have additional funding?” she asked. The city says the cuts, which are being made to all city agencies, are necessary because of projections of a faltering economy. “The situation is very dim and very bleak,” Louis Aiani, deputy executive director of the DOE’s Integrated Service Center, told District 18’s CEC. Aiani noted that local schools have more funding than in years past. “This cut comes after years of financial resources,” Aiani said. During the last two fiscal years, the DOE says it cut $230 million from the bureaucracy and sent the money to schools. But by losing that money now, public schools will again lack sufficient funding, parents argue. “How can you honestly consider taking that away from them?” Bousquet said. “There’s no way to justify that.”
