Hey, school cuts aren't my fault - Sheldon Silver slams Mayor Bloomberg

Hey, school cuts aren't my fault - Sheldon Silver slams Mayor Bloomberg
BY ERIN EINHORN and CARRIE MELAGO DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
Friday, May 23rd 2008, 4:00 AM

Powerful State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver lashed out at Mayor Bloomberg and his schools chancellor Thursday for trying to blame school budget cuts on the state.
"That's a smokescreen," Silver said. "The chancellor's cuts are for one reason and one reason alone. And that is that the mayor's proposed budget contains cuts. Period."
Chancellor Joel Klein says strings attached to state budget dollars requiring him to spare the city's neediest schools from the brunt of budget cuts have forced him to wallop successful and coveted schools like Stuyvesant High School and the New York City Lab School.
The Professional Performing Arts School in Manhattan would lose more of its budget than any other school, taking a 6.09% cut - $224,706. And Bronx Science faces a 5.34% cut, or $825,448.
But Klein says that if Silver and other pols in Albany agree to relax some of the state rules, he'll be able to soften the blow to those schools and ensure that none loses more than a modest 1.4% of its budget.
At a meeting about the budgets with a few dozen city principals last night, he said he was fighting to make his budget cuts more equitable.
"If I can get financial parity, some of that money will show up in your budgets," he said.
Meanwhile, he urged them to reach out to parents in their schools about the issue.
"You're school leaders," he said. "Your community needs to be informed and also reassured."
Silver insisted that Albany won't relax the rules and the parents of the hardest-hit schools do not yet seem to be clamoring for a change.
cmelago@nydailynews.com
With Adam Lisberg and Kathleen Lucadamo