What’s Behind the Threat of a Contigency Budget?

Under New York state law, if both the first and second proposed budgets are voted down, then the affected school district is required to implement a state-mandated contingency budget. Our research shows contingency budgets have been used to scare parents (that is, the voters) into supporting the budgets by threatening to cut activities highly-valued by both parents and children, including some sports and special education services. While some school employees could lose their jobs under a contingency budget, the teachers’ union playbook seems to encourage cuts in important extra-curricular programs before even considering freezing teacher salaries. Parents are thus rightly wary of voting budgets down because they don’t want to lose the freshman football team or other sports, and the culture of inevitable budget increases flourishes unquestioned. Teachers’ unions even claim that their salaries are entirely irrelevant to the budgets— which is in a sense true, in that many unions will never allow teacher salaries ever to be cut or frozen, even for the sake of the children. Everything, else, of course, is negotiable.