Posts Tagged ‘education’

New SUNY Canton interim president announced

 

SUNY Canton. NCPR file photo

Hi! SUNY has just made an announcement that will be of interest to many in NCPR’s own Canton-Potsdam area: Dr. Joseph C. Hoffman has been appointed as Acting President of SUNY Canton.

This isn’t a big surprise: The Watertown Daily Times reported in late April that Hoffman had been identified “as a candidate,” although SUNY Central spokesman David D. Doyle said at that time no final decision had been reached. Now it has been, and Hoffman will replace interim president Carli S. Schiffner, who will leave at the end of July to go to a college in Washington state (Hoffman begins June 1; I guess she has to train him on the computer system.)

SUNY Canton has been the subject of a fair amount of concern in recent months, as many worried that SUNY’s goal of “shared services” would mean that the Canton and Potsdam campuses would get short shrift, and possibly a shared presidency.

Hoffman comes to us from SUNY Maritime college in the Bronx. He’ll make $170,000.

 

 

Tuesday news roundup: Hospitals, schools, and bars

Photo: Jon S, Creative Commons, some rights reserved

Correction: This post originally said that the Vermont legislature had passed the migrant workers’ driver’s license legislation. In fact, that legislation hasn’t passed and is still in the legislature. 

Hello! Today from our newsroom we have a delightful selection of stories, including but not limited to the following:

In Gouverneur, EJ Noble hospital is open again after a raft of problems caused it to close at the New York State Department of Health’s orders…but patients haven’t returned yet, and that’s a worry.

More details on Brooklyn Senator John Sampson’s arrest on various corruption charges (embezzlement, a coverup), and the reaction to them (the word “staggering” makes an appearance).

And The Vermont legislature’s wrapping up its session, and looking at end of life laws, legal marijuana, and a migrant driver’s license.  It’s also passed a bill that would allow migrant workers to have driver’s licenses, and Gov. Peter Shumlin says he’ll sign that. Gov. Peter Shumlin has said he will sign that bill.

Elsewhere in our region, more school cuts, this time at Northeastern Clinton Central School District (NCCS, in Champlain), where a proposed budget cuts positions (including an English and math teacher, two teaching assistants, and other positions) and electives (and Model UN) as enrollment increases (That story from the Press-Republican.) The new spending plan, up for a vote May 21, includes nearly $90,000 in reductions. Also notable in this story is a comment from NCCS Interim Superintendent Gerald Blair on a recent influx of 68 new students: “They came from a variety of places, and they were not local.”

If you’re a fishing kind of person, St. Lawrence County FishCap will be helping the DEC restock trophy trout in local rivers this afternoon. Details, from FishCap’s Facebook page: “Please plan to meet at the Nicholville Bridge at 2:00pm today. Wear boots or water shoes. We will be transporting fish from the truck to the river. We need all the volunteers we can get. Need more information call Bob 315-600-7533.”

Potsdam fraternities are worried about the future, the Watertown Daily Times reports. It seems there’s a bit of a problem with hazing and alcohol abuse, and an 11-member task force has been researching the issue for the last three months in an effort to fix the problem. There’s some concern that when the task force held a public meeting yesterday, almost everyone who showed up was a student and a member of a fraternity or sorority.

And in Essex County, the Plattsburgh Press-Republican reports, people are going to have to get their drinking in a little earlier if a new rule shortening bar hours gets approval from the New York State Liquor Authority. But don’t worry too much — the earlier time is 3 am (it’s been 4 am for some time now.) The County Board of Supervisors voted 15-1 in favor of the measure.

 

 

School board meeting night: Cuts, tax increases, unrest

Photo: KB35, Creative Commons, some rights reservedUpd

Update, 12:30pm: Our reporter Julie Grant just spoke with Canton Central Superintendent Bill Gregory, who told her the district is eliminating one bus route. The district had considered cutting all student transportation within Canton village limits, but Gregory says that’s now off the table, at least until next year.

***

Good morning! It’s only Tuesday, but it’s been a big week already for school budgets, and for making tough compromises.

In Canton last night, the Watertown Daily Times reports, the Canton Central Board of Education voted on its budget; the one it passed will increase the school tax levy by 5.4 percent, which is the most allowed under the New York state tax cap. That means the owner of an average-priced Canton home will pay $73 more per year than he or she is paying this year. (Residents will vote on the budget on May 21, with an official public hearing on May 9.)

The Board of Education also came out in favor of filling the middle school principal job that will become vacant July 1, although (naturally) that discussion is about much more than just one position. There’s a lot more detail on that in the paper.

An April 12 article in the Times had talked about the Canton budget eliminating a bus driver job (and eliminating one bus run through consolidations along with cutting after school bus trips), along with three others (a high school social studies position, a librarian and a special education teacher) that would be left vacant when their current holders retire. We’ll be following up on the specifics of the new budget and will check in with those as we know more.

In Massena, the Board of Education voted last night to eliminate the alternative education program called the Delta School of Choice. And that’s not the only thing the new budget is cutting. The new budget eliminates the equivalent of 29.25 full time positions, for a spending decrease of $1.77 million. On top of that, three positions will be cut through attrition or retirement, 1.5 will be replaced with lower-salaried jobs, and two will be moved over to the St. Lawrence-Lewis BOCES.

And there’s so much more detail about what Massena’s cutting in the paper. If you’re wondering, it does include teachers, at the high school and middle school levels. All this to help close a budget shortfall of $5.6 million, which Finance Committee Chair Michael J. LeBire said would exhaust district reserves by 2016-17 if the district didn’t take steps.

Voters will also face a 2.9 percent tax increase.

The Watertown City School District has been informing staff members about layoffs and program cuts yesterday and today, but until they’ve shared those decisions with the people who are going to be affected, they’re not sharing with the press, reports the Watertown Daily Times.

Superintendent Terry N. Fralick started meeting with those whose jobs or programs are slated to be cut yesterday; although as we said details aren’t forthcoming yet, we know the district plans to cut nearly $500,000 in personnel and programs. So we’ll see where that goes.

And finally, WWNY-TV is reporting that the Clifton-Fine Central Board of Education meeting was characterized last night by “unrest”, with students and teachers protesting the board’s decision to terminate the contract of Interim Principal Brian Buchanan.

It seems that things have gotten somewhat ugly in the administration of this district: The board’s plan is to move Interim Superintendent Sue Sheen back into her original position as principal (replacing Buchanan); Sheen was interested in the Super position (who wouldn’t be, since it’s got “super” in it?) but for unspecified reasons the board didn’t approve her.

Buchanan (whose termination, you may recall, students and teachers are protesting) was reviewed for a “physical confrontation he had with a student that was caught on camera.” He’ll be moving on to a new job as principal in the Oneida, NY, City School District. There’s also some intrigue involving an allegedly threatening email from a school board member to a staff member; apparently there was a “heated back and forth” on this matter.

Julie Grant contributed substantial reporting for this post.

NY’s biggest teachers union throws in against testing

Saranac Lake Middle School students take the state standardized English language arts test in April 2012 in the school’s gymnasium. Photo: Chris Knight via Adirondack Daily Enterprise

Last week we reported that parents in some of the North Country’s local schools are pushing back against the increasing reliance on standardized testing in New York State. In fact, they’re boycotting the third and eighth grade testing still underway this week. Last week, the kids took the English portion of the tests; this week it’s math.

Chris Knight followed up that story in The Adirondack Daily Enterprise with the news that the Saranac Lake boycott of the English test drew 54 students – double what organizers had expected.

Reportedly, thousands joined the boycott statewide. Now it seems the state’s largest teachers union is piggy-backing on the parent concerns, and throwing its weight in with an ad campaign and a petition. New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) has its own oar in the water on this,  as test scores are now to be used in teacher evaluations. (Here’s a press release from NYSUT stating the organization’s position on state testing.)

The Albany Times Union reports this sympathy with the parent boycott comes despite the union’s public agreement on using the test scores in teacher evaluations, which dates back to Feb., 2012, when Gov. Andrew Cuomo brokered agreement between teachers unions and the state Education Department:

New York State United Teachers President Richard Iannuzzi stood on stage with state Education Commissioner John King to announce the hard-won plan. Leaders of the state’s two powerful unions had finally agreed that the tests were a valid method of assessing teacher success when paired with other measures…

Iannuzzi hasn’t recanted, the TU reports, and NYSUT has a lot of issues on its to-do list besides testing. But at the same time, the union’s website includes an account of its president’s visit to Rome, in Oneida County, under the headline: Iannuzzi: Over-testing a communitywide concern:

Iannuzzi said that the state’s obsession with standardized testing  — which Rome Teachers Association President Rob Wood called “a set-up for failure — has brought together teachers and parents like never before. NYSUT has led a very public campaign against the over-emphasis on tests, even though the new curriculum has not yet been taught in many cases.

There’s a handy “Too Much Testing?” petition for parents and educators to sign at the union website. And an account of a meeting of union members in a six-county area in Central new York focuses on the impact on students:

The auditorium was silent listening to the account of a gifted student – an incredible thinker – who burst into tears at the words, “Pencils down,” because she hadn’t had time to finish the last essay. Minutes later, she was still “walking down the hallway with tears streaming down her face. And she’s 8.

The Central New York meeting comes during the run-up to a major NYSUT “rally for education”, on June 8, in Albany.

Saranac Lake parents say no to NYS standardized tests

Hello! It’s the last full day of our spring fundraiser, so, quick plug, if you haven’t given yet you can take care of it right now, online. We’re having lots of groovy drawings as well — more on those here.

So, you may have noticed that there’s been a lot of talk lately about standardized testing in education (unless, of course, you live beneath a rock — a rock underneath which there are no public schools.) Here’s a story from last year that sums up how some feel about the situation nicely. In Saranac Lake, some parents have taken the matter into their own hands, and are (or their kids are) opting out of the state standardized tests that begin Tuesday. At least 25 students between third and eighth grade won’t take the six days of English and math tests.

One local parent, Vanessa Houghtlin of Saranac Lake, told the paper why her two kids won’t be taking the tests:

We feel there’s an over-reliance on state testing in the schools that’s damaging the quality of the eduction there, demoralizing a lot of the teachers and children, and undermining the high-level teaching and learning we think are important for children and our whole culture.

There’s a lot more in the article on how this opting out works, what parents’ objections are, and what they’re hoping to accomplish. The Saranac Lake school board also unanimously passed a resolution against New York’s increased emphasis on standardized testing at its meeting Wednesday night, saying it has caused

Considerable collateral damage in too many schools, including narrowing the curriculum, teaching to the test, reducing love of learning, pushing students out of school, driving excellent teachers out of the profession, and undermining school climate.

School districts around the state and the country have passed similar resolutions, the article said. Both parents and the school board say they’re hoping the state will reconsider its testing policies.

 

 

Rutgers scandal shows ugly underbelly of college sports

Front cover of Jackie Robinson comic book (issue #5). Photo: Library of Congress, public domain

Two cultural moments converged this month in American sports that bear thinking about.

The first was the scandal that erupted around Rutgers college basketball coach Mike Rice, who was filmed physically, verbally and emotionally abusing his players.

The other was unveiling of the new film “42″ about Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier, opening professional baseball and American sport to non-whites.

Robinson helped to shift the national dialogue about race and human decency.

Here’s how these two moments connect.  In professional sports, players — black, white, male and female — now possess enough power and influence to protect their basic interests.

They have a seat at the table.  Their dignity, their financial security, their physical safety are all at least given reasonable shrift in negotiations.

But in college sports, we remain locked in a pre-1940s cultural bubble, where mostly white sports professionals like Coach Rice retain all the power and players are prohibited by the NCAA from retaining even the most basic legal or professional counsel.

The abuse that went on at Rutgers was allowed to continue not because college officials were complacent — though that’s true as well.

No, the main culprit here is a fundamental, systemic and institutionalized powerlessness on the part of those young men who were being abused.

They knew when those balls were being hurled at their bodies, when they were being kicked and punched and shoved, that there was literally no one with any authority whose primary job was to represent and protect their interests.

This is nothing new.  College sport has long been a shameful enterprise.

It is predicated on the idea that a mostly white community of university employees will enrich themselves fabulously, while a largely black cadre of players — along with often rural, poor white athletes — will play for free.

The lipstick on this pig is the pretense that these “student athletes” are receiving good educations (a fiction in most cases) or that a significant percentage of them have a shot at professional careers (a fiction in the vast majority of cases).

When Rice hurled those balls at those young men — when he blasted them with profanity and vicious homophobic slurs — he was acting out physically a much larger institutional system.

It is a system in which coaches and athletic directors and college presidents control everything.  Players, meanwhile, are powerless pawns, often subjected to astonishing physical risk and chronic head trauma.

Jackie Robinson shattered the color barrier.

One wonders when a student athlete will be empowered to shatter the college sports cabal that has disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of athletes while generating billions of dollars for the people who manipulate and exploit them.

One wonders when universities will begin to break with the shameful tradition of running a massive sports and media empire on the backs of poor, underprivileged and powerless young people.

So tonight when the NCAA men’s basketball championship game is played, I won’t be watching.  The system is too broken, too ugly, in much the way that professional baseball was shamefully broken before Robinson’s groundbreaking time.

More money for North Country schools not enough

Potsdam Central School. NCPR file photo

It’s a tough time for schools, budget-wise. We’ve been covering this story extensively for some time now, but one recent story by Julie Grant lays out the problem as it currently stands: In that story, Hermon-DeKalb Central School superintendent Ann Adams says, although local schools did better than expected in this year’s budget, the district has “nothing left to cut,” and that it’s close to the point of going broke.

Another story from that same day, April 2, has incoming Saranac Lake Central school superintendent telling reporter Chris Knight that the main problem she’s facing in her new position is, well, money. That district is looking at a budget gap of more than $1 million.

We’ve seen this story repeated again and again throughout our region (and we can be sure it’s not just a North Country problem.) North Country Now is reporting this week that local school superintendents (the article quotes superintendents from Potsdam and Norwood-Norfolk)  are saying that while that state aid increase might save some jobs this year, rural districts won’t survive if there’s not some serious change.

What kind of change are they suggesting, you ask? Well, mandate relief, not suprisingly, and an adjustment in the state school aid formula, which many feel benefits wealthier districts at the expense of poorer ones.

They’re also looking to eliminate something called the “Gap Elimination Adjustment,” (GEA) which (follow me here) divides a portion of the state’s funding shortfall among all school districts in the state, and subtracts that amount from state aid (somewhat wonkier details in the article.) The GEA, has been reduced somewhat in the latest budget.

Missing from this article is another big topic in rural education, and one that’s come up lately here in the North Country: consolidation. This may be because the article’s actually about preserving school districts, but consolidation looks to be emerging as a more and more important issue as time goes on (actually, 18 St. Lawrence County school districts participated in a consolidation study two years ago that recommended the creation of regional high schools, among other things.) Some school districts have considered taking steps toward consolidation, as Ogdensburg did last month, and several Tri-Lakes schools did last year.

 

 

 

Afternoon read: Tough times, high costs for college students

Two articles in the Watertown Daily Times today underline the changing, and often grim, situation in which college students find themselves today.

The first article looks at how SUNY schools are adapting to meet student needs at a time when six-year graduation rates aren’t particularly high in the state’s public education system (or indeed nationwide), students are taking on more debt, working more, and in some cases just pursuing higher education in a different way.

Students are now looking for more flexibility, in many cases because they transfer schools one or more times during their college careers as they narrow down what they want (also public schools are cheaper than private ones, so getting credits taken care of at a SUNY makes financial sense for many students.)

Many more students are now working while attending school, and this means they take longer to graduate (which would account in part for the low six-year graduation rate figures). This is also resulting in more students wanting to get 2-year associate degrees rather than four-year bachelor’s degrees — they’ll have something to show after fewer hours of investment.

SUNY seems to be looking to be more flexible with students, to make financial aid more transparent and easy to understand, and also (although I’m not sure to what extent this falls under the category of meeting student needs) to make how it measures things like graduation and transfer rates more accurate.

It’s worth mentioning that tuition for SUNY schools in our area isn’t exactly the money you find in the couch: For Potsdam, full time undergraduate in-state tuition and fees, if you live on campus, total $16,375; Canton will run you something like $11,863; and Jefferson Community College is in the range of either $3,744 or $5,394, depending on whether you live in Jefferson County or not. There’s no on-campus housing at JCC (I did this math myself, so there might be some minor inconsistencies based on how the universities describe the costs of their services.)

But in the “putting things in perspective” section of today’s post, private school costs are much, much higher: Estimated tuition and fees for a 2012-13 student at St. Lawrence University in Canton is $55,835; at Clarkson in Potsdam, they’re $51,144. This obviously doesn’t take into account financial aid packages many students receive.

But hey, what if that financial aid package isn’t enough? A second story in the Times today looks at a piece of legislation U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) is introducing to require private loan companies to forgive student loan debt immediately after a student dies. “Andrew’s Law” is named after Syracuse native Andrew Prior, who was killed by a drunk driver in 2010. He’d just graduated from college, and Andrew’s student loan company sought for two years to have his parents, who were cosigners, pay off the loan.

Now, federal student loans are already governed by legislation that requires loan forgiveness when a student dies. This legislation would extend that protection to those taking on private loans. Private student loans are also more expensive than federal loans. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau recently found that more than $8 billion in private loans are in default.

Woof.

 

 

Are North Country schools bleeding out?

Will we find a way to reinvent North Country schools?

The story in the Plattsburgh Press Republican last week said it all.  Peru’s central school district is scrambling to close a $2.9 million gap for next year’s budget — and this follows in the wake of roughly $1 million in cuts last year.

”It’s been painful,” School Board member Lisa Crosby said at the meeting, according to the P-R. “This year is going to be devastatingly painful.”

The same narrative is playing out across the North Country.  District after district is moving forward, year by year, with “incremental” cuts that are slowly gutting the quality and richness of our public schools.

Today’s Glens Falls Post Star talks about school districts making “desperate choices.”

“We are trying to stretch out ours as long as we can,” Fort Ann Superintendent Maureen VanBuren told the newspaper. “None of us want to be the first ones to figure out what to do if we become insolvent.”

It’s like that old tale about the frog.  You throw a frog into a boiling pot of water and it does its best to hop out.  But if you put a frog in a pot of water and slowly turn up the heat, it’ll cook without ever noticing.

That’s what we’re seeing happen before our eyes.  Education programs are hollowing out.  Value-added programs for talented kids are being stripped away.

Support programs for children with special needs shelved or trimmed back to the point of meaninglessness.

And the thing is that everyone knows we’re still just setting off on this journey.  Schools across the region see their population of kids dwindling, their funding going down.

Unless we get a grip on this, it will be a million dollars in cuts here and million dollars in cuts there until someone turns out the lights.

Before I talk about possible solutions, let me first acknowledge the hard work that boards of education, administrators and teachers have been doing already

When the economy tanked in 2008, the state budget toppled into a meat grinder, and property tax revenues flattened.  The poor folks running our schools found themselves squarely in the cross-hairs of a global meltdown.

Then, when the 2% property tax cap sailed through the legislature, they were promised help with mandate reform that never arrived.

While everyone else was talking in abstract terms about lean government  — this means you, Governor Cuomo — local schools had to do the brutal work of actually cutting important programs.

But the hard truth is that this is the future.

No one I talk to thinks that funding for education is ever going to soar back to the growth levels we once enjoyed.  Nor are costs for things like pensions, energy, and healthcare going to shrink.

So the time has come for education leaders in our region to pivot from desperately bailing the old life boat to building a better new boat that will survive the coming storm.

Here are six concrete steps that can help save (at least some of) our public schools.

1.  Stop talking about the past.  Stop denying that fundamental change is inevitable.

I get it, we all love our schools.  We wish they could continue to look the same and do the same things going forward that they used to do.  But that’s over.

The truth is that everything changed about five years ago and we’re just waking up to the fact.  Unless we put all our options on the table and talk about how to create a new, affordable model for schools, the future will be extraordinarily painful.

2.  Each school district needs a new vision, driven by community values.

Districts should convene community dialogues to decide what exactly it is that schools can and must do.  What is the core, the heart, the essential mission?  This will guide the rest of the conversation.

When we cut programs (and we will cut programs) which should be held sacred?  When we’re forced to partner with other districts (and we will be forced to partner and share and merge) how do those alliances serve our core values?

When should we be willing to go beyond the 2% property tax cap?

It’s also important to clarify which local values match (or don’t match) the educational mandates coming from Albany.  That way, we’ll know which fights to pick.

3.  All the old turf garbage has to be thrown out.  Right now.

The Los Angeles Central School district educates more than 640,000 kids, spread over a vast geographic area, tackling levels of cultural diversity and neighborhood conflict that we can’t even begin to imagine.

In our hearts, we all know that the north Country’s balkanized, village-by-village education system is a throwback to the horse and buggy days.

So no more muttering about how different Keene is from Elizabethtown, or how awesome the geographic and cultural divides are between Saranac Lake and Tupper Lake.  Start partnering and sharing and merging.  It’s time.  It’s do-or-die.

Click map to view full size.

Even if you do all the things in steps 1, 2 and 3, things are going to get tough.  Especially if some of your core values require some lofty or expensive goals.  So talk honestly about that.

If your community insists on maintaining a fully autonomous district, even if you have only a few hundred (or a few dozen) kids, make it plain that that approach will almost certainly cost local taxpayers — big time.   Lay out the numbers.

5.  Open a new dialogue with teachers.

Teachers have values too, obviously, and those go beyond salary and benefits.  So put everything on the table.  What’s the new model for fair and reasonable, sustainable and respectful compensation?

Take the conversation deeper than a traditional short-term contract negotiation.  What will give teachers real job satisfaction? More job security?  Better pupil-teacher ratios? More training or support in the classroom?

Are there innovative trade-offs that can make teachers happier and more affordable at the same time?  Teachers, meanwhile, need to force their unions to think more broadly than pushing for annual pay increases and holding the line on pensions.

Again, stop denying that fundamental change is inevitable.

5.  Be sure to set positive goals as well as negative ones.

Yes, your plan going forward will include painful decisions.  Consolidation, closed buildings, fewer teachers and programs.  All those are possible, and even likely.

But once you have your values in place, find some programs that are important enough that they need to grow and get better.  Become a magnet school.  Develop some specialties.

When you have to go beyond the property tax cap to pay for the school  district’s core values, don’t be afraid of asking voters to do that.

In the end, I suspect that a lot of schools won’t engage this kind of transformational, values-driven discussion.  They’ll keep fighting to maintain something that resembles the familiar and the normal.

They’ll keep thinking year-to-year, stretching out those fund reserves as long as possible.  They’ll keep making what feel like responsible, pragmatic short-term decisions.

Meanwhile, the heart of the education experience will bleed out.

But those North Country districts that will still be strong in the year 2026 — when the current batch of kindergartners will be graduating from high school — are those that begin right now to plan for the inevitable transformation.

Cuomo budget address: how’s he going to pay for that?

Image from Governor Andrew Cuomo’s presentation, highlighting education. So how’s he going to pay for his plans for expanded schooling? Photo: NYS Governor’s Office

3:45 p.m. You can listen to the full audio from Gov. Cuomo’s budget address here.

2:59 p.m. The governor is still speaking, but reactions are already coming into our newsroom (two so far) This from a press release from the Last Store on Main Street Coalition, an organization which represents those against the sales of wine in grocery stores:

“With his Executive Budget today, Governor Cuomo has demonstrated once again that he recognizes the best way to lift the New York wine industry and create jobs is to invest in a consumer-based marketing program, which is exactly what he does with his $2 million Taste NY program. The more New Yorkers understand the high quality wine made right here at home, the more they drink it and the more they buy it.” More wine!

In another press release, Mike Durant, State Director of National Federation of Independent Business/New York (it seems the small-business-type organizations were right on this) had more mixed feelings. While pleased that the governor “maintains the theme of fiscal responsibility continues to right-size state government and closes the current budget gap while rejecting any new tax increases.  Financially, this budget proposal is a continuation of existing efforts to rebuild New York’s fiscal health and encourage sustained economic growth.”

Durant was less pleased with the governor’s minimum wage plan–in fact, he was “deeply disappointed”, saying his group “strongly urge[s] the Governor and legislative leaders to focus on additional areas of regulatory reform and cost reduction for small business.”

This is just the first trickle of what’s sure to be a flood of reaction, but there you have it. Complete coverage of the address tomorrow morning on the 8 O’clock Hour.

1:50

As I write we are mere minutes from one of the most exciting moments of the year for New York state residents, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s budget address.

All right, maybe not—while the budget address may lack some of the flair and showmanship of the State of the State address earlier this month, it’s to a great extent where the rubber hits the road, policy-wise – it’s the moment when Gov. Cuomo has to explain how he’s going to pay for the ambitious plans he described in that address, even as State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli is saying New York’s not taking in quite as much as he’d anticipated.

One big question is how the state’s going to pay for the expansion of learning time in schools that Cuomo proposed, describing his priorities thusly: “When it comes to education, I have two words, more and better.”  

Cuomo’s said the budget plan’s not likely to have a lot of surprises, and he’s expected to talk about how the state will fund plans to support upstate jobs programs and tourism, and how his administration plans to keep growth in state spending under two percent. Mandate relief is also on the agenda, or the rundown, if you will.

For much, much more detail, here’s a link to the briefing book for the speech, so you can see even before Cuomo says it what the plan is (PDF). We’ll have full coverage of the address tomorrow morning on the 8 O’clock hour; meanwhile, you can listen to the address on our air or at ncpr.org, and you can watch it here. Happy budgeting!