“We have more students who are coming to school who are not potty-trained.”

Marie Wiles was blunt about the increasingly basic needs of her pupils. She has served as superintendent of the Guilderland Central Schools, a suburb of Albany, for 14 years. 

“It’s a big discussion. Toileting needs are a part of the conversation now along with managing behaviors. It’s generally taking students longer to learn school behaviors. It’s a reality of our day to day. It’s everywhere, not just here," she said.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, educators from urban, suburban and rural school districts tell Capital Tonight that the array and depth of student needs have increased substantially.

“Our students have greater needs, and our costs are greater than they used to be,” according to David Little, executive director of the Rural Schools Association.

Jennifer Pyle, executive director of the Conference of Big 5 School Districts, which represents New York City, Yonkers, Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo as well as Albany, Mount Vernon and Utica, said some districts chose to spend one-time COVID grant funding on recurring expenses like social workers, counselors and psychologists. 

“We receive criticism, of course, for doing that...but it was something where we didn’t have a choice. This is what our kids needed,” she said. “And a lot of those positions are now on the chopping block.” 

As 2025 approaches, educators are facing a trifecta of change: the loss of COVID-era money; the retooling of the Foundation Aid formula — the primary formula for distributing state aid — and possible disruption from the incoming Trump administration. 

Wiles is worried.

“We may be on the brink of a perfect storm,” she said.

Possible federal changes

Regarding changes discussed by the Trump administration, Robert Lowry, the long-time deputy director of the New York State Council of School Superintendents, agrees there’s a lot for school districts in liberal states like New York to be concerned about. But he warns against pre-panicking.

“The president-elect has proposed eliminating the U.S. Education Department, something that I will emphasize to school officials, doesn’t mean that all the programs administered by the Education Department would go away,” Lowry said.

The elimination of the department would require congressional action.

Lowry noted that the country didn’t have a federal Education Department until 1979. Instead, major federal education funding programs like Title I, which provides compensatory education targeted to disadvantaged children; Title III, which provides support for multilingual students and Title VII, which provides support for civil rights issues, were administered through other agencies.

“What we’re hearing is troubling. Obviously, Title I funding for schools with low-income students, IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) funding for special needs students, those are two huge areas,” said Jennifer Pyle. "Fifty percent of the kids in special ed [in New York state] are in my eight districts. Sixty-seven percent of the English language learners are in my eight districts. Forty-three of the kids in the state are in my eight districts, and the bulk of them are poor.” 

Pyle is also keeping an ear out for information about the future of the school lunch program and the possible elimination of the summer meal program for children who are not enrolled in school.

Asked to speculate how changes in federal funding could impact New York, NYSCOSS’ Lowry said administrators in Washington have a variety of levers at their disposal.

“Cuts to the program, changes in how the funding is allocated among states; potentially, changes in how funding is allocated among districts. Is there some sort of block grant initiative?” Lowry wondered. “The campaign also made statements to the effect that the (Trump) administration would attempt to withhold funding to schools which are teaching critical race theory or are somehow being overly supportive of transgender children.”

Rick Timbs, executive director of the Statewide School Finance Consortium, agrees with Lowry.

“They’re going to say, if you want money, you better be emphasizing this and not this, whether it’s regarding migrants, LGBTQ+ issues, or transgender rights," Timbs sai.

According to Pyle, there is also heightened concern among migrant students’ families. 

“Anecdotally, there are parents coming into school expressing their concerns about the safety of their children. Sending their children to school and what the implications will be for their families,” Pyle said. “They want to keep their families intact and not knowing what will happen, which is deeply troubling. Their fears are reasonable given the rhetoric that we’re hearing.” 

Timbs states that underlying these changes is a battle for control.

“It’s not just local control. It’s parental control, it’s educational control,” he explained.

Timbs believes that many cultural issues that people had thought were “settled” have turned into micro-movements.

“Look at the movement, for example, to ban certain books in school libraries. What’s actually happening is that there are attempts across states, including New York state, for more local control, more local say on what happens and what doesn’t happen, what’s allowed or not allowed, what is taught, what is not taught, what inferences are made or not made within public schools.”

He sees the New York state Board of Regents’ “New Pathways to Graduation” as one response to these currents.

To some conservatives, the changes need to go further.

“I’m a fairly moderate conservative. I have three daughters, the last one is in college and just started. But I found myself having to deprogram them every day coming back from school. And I’m not extreme in that sense at all,” Bill O’Reilly, a newspaper columnist and Republican strategist for the November Team, told Capital Tonight.  

“For example, I might talk about the Rockefellers, and immediately it came out ‘those bastards.’ Everything was negative. ‘Those robber barons.' And now we are at the point where you’re questioned if you question that a boy could turn into a girl,” he said. “I am not uncommon. All my friends with children, we have had the same conversations for years and these are not very political people.”

While O’Reilly supports educational change, he thinks New York should have a lot more autonomy under the Trump administration because states’ rights is a core conservative principle.

“On paper, it’s probably less of a freakout than people think. The other thing is, how much could they actually pull off? There are so many issues out there to go after,” he said. 

O’Reilly, Timbs and Lowry all agree that the incoming Trump administration will likely push for more charter, voucher and religious schools.

“I think it will end up back in court,” O’Reilly said, referring to Blaine Amendment battles from the past which prohibit state legislatures from appropriating funds to religious schools.

Health care and the state Department of Education

NYSCOSS’ Lowry is also concerned about two other issues that have been somewhat under the radar: the federal funding utilized by the New York state Education Department and health care. 

“I’m no expert in health care, but if I add it up correctly, we use over $75 billion in federal money to support Medicaid, Child Health Plus and the Essential Plan.” 

Lowry wonders aloud what the ripple effect might be for schools if that money were to be slashed at the federal level.

“I do not believe that if you’re hit with something of that magnitude that the impact would be restricted just to health care,” he said. “The state would try and preserve some services and the greater the impact on the state budget, the greater the possible impact on school districts. And it wouldn’t be just wealthy districts because wealthy districts don’t get that much aid. So the deeper need for cuts, whether it’s some federal action or a downturn in the economy, the harder it is to spare school aid.”

According to Lowry, the New York state Education Department is another issue to keep an eye on considering that federal funds support 57% of the department’s total operating budget.

“Of course, NYSED does more than P-12 education. They do a lot with adult vocational rehabilitation services for adults with disabilities which involves federal money. But their office of P-12 education, the part that I have the most interaction with, about 2/3rds of the staff in that office are funded with federal dollars.”

Federal funds for aid to school districts and other P-12 institutions totals $5.39 billion in New York state. For perspective, state-funded school aid totals $35.89 billion. Federal funding for staff and non-personnel costs of SED’s Office of P12 Education totals $234 million and funds nearly two-thirds of the staff positions in that office.

NYSED did not grant an interview request to Capital Tonight about this issue. 

Foundation Aid

“My biggest worry honestly is about Foundation Aid because that is a much bigger part of our operating budget than our federal dollars are. We have, you know, monies connected to the Titles I, II, III, IV. We have two grants connected to special education, but they are a relatively small part of the dollars that we have. Foundation Aid changes could potentially be much more devastating,” Guilderland’s Marie Wiles explained. “We’re kind of in a wait and see mode.”

When this year’s budget was finally enacted by the state Legislature and signed into law by the governor, New York had invested a record $35.9 billion into school aid, including $24.9 billion in Foundation Aid alone. 

But there was something else in the budget that schools around the state took notice of.

The governor had commissioned the Rockefeller Institute of Government, headed by former state Budget Director Robert Megna, to study the outdated Foundation Aid formula. 

It wasn’t a surprise. Earlier in the session, in Gov. Kathy Hochul’s executive budget, she had eliminated "Save Harmless," a provision in the aid formula that prevents any schools from receiving less aid than it did the year before.

The governor argued that student populations were shrinking, and that school budgets needed to be “right-sized." The Legislature and education advocates argued that before making any big changes, the state needed to take a more holistic look at the formula.

A compromise was reached. While the enacted budget didn’t include the elimination of "Save Harmless," the governor successfully lowered the inflation factor in the education budget from 3.4% to 2.8% and asked the Rockefeller Institute to come up with Foundation Aid recommendations by Dec. 1, which is this coming Sunday.

Districts could feel a big financial hit from even the smallest changes to the 26-year-old Foundation Aid formula.

“Buffalo receives 73% of their money from the state, 16% from federal. Their local share is so low. If the state doesn’t come through with the funding and the federal government fails to deliver or cuts back, there will be nowhere to go,” the Conference of Big 5’s Jennifer Pyle explained. 

Pyle’s concerns are echoed by David Little of the Rural Schools Association. 

“The governor is fond of asking why should we be paying for students that aren’t there anymore. Well, for the same reason that New York is paying more in its budget despite the fact that it has fewer residents,” Little said, pointedly.

Additionally, according to Wiles, the number of students with disabilities that Guilderland serves is rising, which means the district’s costs are rising too.

“We’ve had to expand the number of classrooms to meet the needs of additional students [with disabilities] who have either moved into Guilderland or who are newly identified,” she said. “So, we had to add another classroom and next year, it looks like we’re going to need a fifth elementary self-contained classroom. And they’re all full. School districts may have fewer students, but we have a greater percentage of students with significant needs.” 

All of these competing pressures have members of New York state Conference of School Superintendents feeling a rise in pessimism, according to Bob Lowry.

“Every year since 2016, we’ve asked how optimistic or pessimistic are you…regarding your district’s ability to maintain adequate services for students and this year it was 82% pessimistic and 16% optimistic,” Lowry said. “Two years ago, it was 55% optimistic. And this survey was done back in August before the election.”

Wiles may have summed up how educators in New York feel about 2025. 

“There’s just a long list of unknowns and they’re all about big things,” she said.