State assistance to SUNY New Paltz has fallen to about 25% of its budget while tuition revenue makes up the rest. These budget cuts have increased class sizes and overwhelmed faculty and staff. We need to fully fund our public higher education, including community colleges, and equip them with the resources that students need to succeed.

• Waive tuition fees for all SUNY Graduate Assistants, so that they are able to live, work, and attain an education with the comfort and dignity that they deserve.
• SUNY New Paltz still faces a $4 million budget deficit going into the next fiscal year. Shrinking SUNY New Paltz’s budget gap from about $8 million to $4 million is not enough. We need multiyear funding increases in operating aid to campuses.
• We cannot continue to replace full-time faculty with underpaid adjunct professors, who are not only exploited, but stretched too thin to be able to provide the education students deserve. We must make investment in full-time faculty a priority.

We must protect and expand upon our public schools to the benefit of our whole communities—including families and students, no matter where they live, and all those who work tirelessly to provide young people with an education.

• Fund schools based equitably instead of through property tax. Funding based on property taxes creates a tiered system where quality of education depends on your zip code.
• Pass Solutions Not Suspensions, which will limit extreme punitive suspension measures that our school systems disproportionately apply to Black and brown students, and instead advance restorative disciplinary approaches centered around communication, cooperation, and respect to hold students accountable. 
• Place a statewide moratorium on all new charter schools, so that we can prevent a quality public education from becoming a scarce commodity.
• Make Universal Pre-K a reality for all New Yorkers. NYC has already taken the lead in this massive expansion of early childhood education, and it’s time we do the same for the rest of the state.
• Fight to end racial and economic disparities in our public education system through the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, which calls for New York to close the spending gap between districts and redistribute funds to benefit students, faculty, and staff in our most underserved schools.
• Support programs and funding that help to diversify and train the schooling workforce.

A student’s well-being is not isolated to their time spent at school, and neither is the teacher’s or the staff’s. To truly invest in education, we must also invest in stable homes.

• Housing, income, and job security at the student’s home are essential in ensuring that our students are getting the most out of our education system. Adequate investment in public education should be complemented with legislation that gets us housing and income security.
• Schools are also work places. It has become far too common for teachers and staff to have to go through difficult and traumatizing experiences in simply doing their job. Adequate counselor to student ratio, and resources that allow teachers and staff to do their job must be the bare minimum.