Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza says he expects the state to announce further cuts to education funding as early as this week and he says the reductions will hurt.

"We are cutting the bone. There is not fat to cut. There is no meat to cut. We are at the bone,” said Carranza.

Suffering a loss of revenue and a surge in costs, the state has warned it may have to slash up to $8.2 billion in aid to local governments for things like education and healthcare. That's on top of prior reductions to the Education Department. Testifying remotely Tuesday before the City Council, Carranza called on the federal government to send more aid directly to school districts.

"Very few things break my heart more than going through this exercise of trying to save resources for our schools.  Let me be very clear: under these circumstances and without additional direct support from the federal government we simply cannot afford to maintain school budgets and programs at fiscal year 2020 levels,” said Carranza.

Council members pressed Carranza to find more cuts from the Education Department's central and borough offices to spare school budgets, but he says those cuts already have been made.

"There are no good choices,” said Carranza.

The chancellor did not directly answer questions about the potential for any layoffs, and said he's working to minimize the effect on classrooms, but acknowledged students might feel a difference.

"Students are gonna feel perhaps bigger class sizes. Students are gonna feel the reduction in services, the reduction in enrichment activities. I think our communities are going to feel the impact of a cut of this nature,” Carranza said.

Those won't be the only changes felt by students. Carranza says the goal is for students to return to schools in September, but doing so safely in normally crowded school buildings may require radical changes. That could mean a school split into groups that alternate days of in-person instruction with remote learning, or students learning in morning and afternoon shifts.

"All of those things are being explored and all of them have real serious benefits and serious downsides,” he added.