In the face of budget cuts, parents at the city’s premier public high school had to pitch in this month just to keep valued programs running until the end of the school year, The Post has learned.
The parent association at Stuyvesant HS in lower Manhattan paid the Department of Education $65,000 to cover the cost of teachers who run after-school tutoring sessions and supervise clubs.
The instructors earn hourly “per-session” pay, similar to overtime.
The donation was meant to cover a portion of the anticipated funding cut in the next semester of as much as $340,000 — which put the school’s 94-year-old newspaper and after-school chorus and band sessions at risk, according to parents.
The exact amount that will be slashed from the city’s 1,500 public schools won’t be known until early February, when Mayor Bloomberg releases details of his preliminary fiscal 2011 budget, city officials said.
But Bloomberg recently ordered the Department of Education to make a 1.5 percent mid-year cut in funding for schools and a 4 percent cut in the coming school year — the fifth and sixth reductions to hit the schools system since January 2008.
“We’re usually trying to enrich the programming. This year we’re trying to maintain it,” Stuyvesant PTA co-president Larry Wood said of the association’s annual contributions to the school.
“It wouldn’t be the same place if it was only academics and you couldn’t even get tutoring to help you,” he added.
“They’re competing with kids across the country to get into the best colleges. Are they going to say, “No, I didn’t have any clubs. I didn’t have a school newspaper’?”
Parents at Brooklyn Tech HS in Fort Greene — another of the city’s most competitive high schools — said they were also put in the position of having to chip in to save after-school programs and clubs.
“The high schools are getting hit pretty hard,” said PTA co-president Enid Febus, who couldn’t immediately say how much parents and alumni contributed.
But educators warn that program losses from budget cuts are going to be widespread, including at many schools that don’t have PTA money to bail them out.
Bronx principal Virginia Connelly said JHS 123 was poised to lose its tutoring sessions and field trips — “all the external and extracurricular kind of things that add up to the life of the school.”
A Manhattan high-school principal said he wasn’t going to be able to order new textbooks and that many after-school activities would likely be cut.
“I think it’s wonderful that the parents of Stuyvesant are helping out the school so that their children get what they need, and at the same time I’m very concerned about all the other schools that don’t have the ability to do that,” said United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew.
“It’s essential that we protect the classroom and vital services to the classroom — especially going into these tough times.”