RSVP HERE.
Mayor de Blasio claims his Executive Budget invests in “A RECOVERY FOR ALL OF US.” But the Mayor’s definition of “ALL” doesn’t seem to include a half-million CUNY students and tens of thousands of CUNY workers.
The Mayor’s budget cuts City funding to CUNY community colleges by $77 million, eliminating funding needed to fill empty staff lines when students are in desperate need of more mental health counseling and academic advising. It cuts funding for remediation services and child care to students, for tutoring and service corps, for food insecurity programs, and for the Accelerated Study in Associate Programs. (The Chancellor has said there’s an agreement to restore ASAP funding, but that doesn’t appear in writing and the details of how the funding will be restored are missing.)
NYC will receive $5.9 billion in local COVID stimulus aid to be used by 2024. There is no good reason for this Mayor—who has up to now delivered on his promises to invest in CUNY—to cut CUNY’s funding. After funding adjunct health insurance and the City’s share of our contracts and increasing funding for CUNY STEM initiatives and ASAP, de Blasio is repudiating his record of support for CUNY. He’s looking at the one-shot stimulus money CUNY colleges will receive and the progress we’ve made increasing State funding and choosing to harm CUNY and the mostly Black and brown students CUNY serves.
