April 8, 2026
Literacy in Community (LINC) is a New York City based nonprofit serving families with children from birth through age five. We work in high poverty neighborhoods across all boroughs to provide empowering programs that help parents and caregivers prepare their children for the formal instruction they will encounter in school as well as share the joy and adventure of reading together.
The majority of our families enroll their children in New York City public schools. Therefore, the structure of the Foundation Aid formula has a direct bearing on the resources available to the families we have served with our early literacy programs.
As a member of the Coalition for Equitable Education Funding, we join other advocates in requesting a long overdue recalibration of the formula, including adding and adjusting weights for factors and circumstances that were not a consideration when the Campaign for Fiscal Equity litigation forced the issue and moved state funding from per pupil to consider factors such as poverty, special education needs and English language learners.
We point to the obvious need to add the circumstances of homelessness/temporary housing and their subsequent disruptions to the weighted factors the Foundation Aid formula uses to calculate a school district’s allocation.
Recently, Advocates for Children of New York released a new brief with data that underscore the need for City and State leaders to do more to ensure the 154,000 NYC students experiencing homelessness can access a high-quality education and receive the support they need to succeed in school. The brief, which highlights key educational indicators for the 2024–25 school year, shows that students in temporary housing—and especially those living in shelter—continue to trail their permanently housed peers on a variety of measures. For example:
- Nearly half of all students in temporary housing, and 63% of students in shelter, were chronically absent last year, meaning they missed at least one out of every ten school days. At minimum, such rates of absenteeism represent a combined 1.1 million days of lost instructional time.
- One in every five students in shelter transferred schools at least once during the 2024–25 school year, more than quadruple the transfer rate of permanently housed students.
- Only 33% of 3rd–8th graders in temporary housing were reading proficiently, according to the 2025 state tests, compared to 60% of their permanently housed peers—a disparity even larger than the one seen in 2024.
One immediate step Governor Hochul and the Legislature can take is to ensure the final FY 2027 State budget updates the Foundation Aid formula to add a weight for students who are homeless or in foster care, as proposed by both the Assembly and the Senate in their one-house budgets. Foundation Aid currently provides no additional resources to help districts address the unique needs of such students, who face barriers above and beyond those associated with poverty.
We urge the State to adopt the Assembly’s proposed weight to provide the necessary resources to support homeless students. We also urge the adoption of the proposal in the Assembly and Senate one-house budgets to increase the weight for English Language Learners. Some of our most vulnerable students will benefit from these measures, ensuring their ability to become productive members of society as adults. Your investment today pays dividends tomorrow.
In Community,
Shari Levine
Executive Director