Under Section 3614 of NYS Ed. Law, school districts are required to provide an annual report which outlines the total budgeted funding allocation for each school building within your district for the upcoming year. To facilitate with this reporting requirement, NYS Department of Budget (DOB) worked closely with SED to create the ‘NYS School Funding Transparency Form’. School districts are required to submit this form to DOB each school year prior to the first day of the school year.
For the 2018-19 school year, only 76 districts in NYS are required to report this information. The due date for these districts to submit their form is August 31st at 5:30 pm. Completed forms should be submitted to DOB via email using the following email address: schooltransparency@budget.ny.gov.
DOB and SED will review the submissions from these 76 districts for compliance within 30 days. To ensure your district is in compliance for this requirement you must fully complete the NYS School Funding Transparency Form in the format required. In the event that your submission is deemed to be ‘noncompliant’, your district will be given an additional 30 days (from the date of the written request from DOB/SED) to revise and resubmit the form. If your district fails to revise and resubmit within this period of time, then your district will be subject to a temporary withholding of your annual State Aid increase for the 2018-19 school year. However, your district may resubmit this form at any time for approval in order to remove the temporary withholding of aid.
For the initial 2018-19 reporting year, only districts with four or more schools (based on SED’s 2016-17 School Report Card Data and 2015-16 Fiscal Masterfile) that are receiving more than fifty percent of their total revenue from State Aid or located in a city with a population of more than one million are required to complete and submit the New York State Funding Transparency Form to DOB and SED. 76 school districts in NYS met this criteria and are required to report this information beginning with the 2018-19 school year. The list of these districts can be found here: List of Districts Required to Report Beginning in the 2018-19 School Year. Reporting for remaining districts will be phased in over the next few years and by the 2020-21 school year all 674 school districts in NYS will be required to submit the form annually.
The form contains several areas which are to be complete. Sections A-E Transparency Form Parts A-E is an excel file to report ‘Data Validation’ information which includes projected data for items such as spending allocations for each school building, districtwide costs included in school spending allocations, enrollment data, demographic data, and other pertinent information. Section F Transparency Form Part F and Section G Transparency Form Part G are both word documents where you are to provide a ‘Narrative Description’ and ‘Certification’ of the data reported.
For additional instructions you may reference the NYS School Funding Transparency Guidance Document here: https://www.budget.ny.gov/schoolFunding/NYSchoolTransparencyGuidanceDocument.pdf. You may also review a list containing frequently asked questions by using the following link: https://www.budget.ny.gov/schoolFunding/NYSchoolTransparencyFAQ.pdf.
