By Staff Reporter
BUFFALO — Six speakers into Wednesday night’s Buffalo Board of Education meeting, interim Superintendent Ebony Prophet-Bullock stepped in and took the vote off the table.
The resolution would have closed or repurposed a net six school buildings starting in the 2027-28 school year. More than 200 people had packed McKinley High School’s auditorium to fight it, The Buffalo News reported.
“We are saying this now because of the raw emotion in the room,” Dr. Prophet-Bullock said, according to The News. “We heard you, we’re pulling it. We will not be voting on it today,” she told the crowd, WBEN reported.
The district will hold a fourth public meeting from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 26, at West Hertel Academy, 489 Hertel Ave. No date has been set for a vote.
The pause gives families a few more days to be heard. It does not change the numbers that put closures on the table. Those numbers are in public records the district and its state-created fiscal monitor, the Buffalo Fiscal Stability Authority, have filed over the past 15 months. The Chronicle reviewed the authority’s analyses, board minutes and resolutions, along with state enrollment data. Together they show a district that has been promising to close schools for more than a year, has twice put it off, and still has not filed the four-year financial plan state law requires.
A plan that kept changing
The closure proposal Dr. Prophet-Bullock unveiled Oct. 2 named eight schools. She said it would save about $24 million a year, Spectrum News reported. WBEN reported that the original plan would cut 73 teaching positions.
The plan was revised on Oct. 14 and again on the eve of the vote. The newest version, first reported by WIVB on Tuesday morning, added School 17, an early childhood center on West Delavan Avenue, to the closure list and would turn its building into administrative offices. It took the Ronald Peoples School of Scholars, School 82, off the list. It moved Middle Early College into the East Community High School building on Northampton Street. And it sent Leonardo da Vinci High School and Research Laboratory High School back to Riverside Academy’s building on Ontario Street, as the first version had proposed.
The News described the final resolution as a net loss of six schools with annual savings of about $20 million.
School 17’s principal, Cameron Hall, told a community meeting Tuesday that more than 80 percent of his students attend regularly, including many students with autism, and called the prospect of moving them “heartbreaking,” WKBW reported.
“We want them to have time to voice their opinions, just like all the other schools were able to. We just feel like it’s so quick, and we’d like some more time,” said Christine Smith, a coach at School 17, according to WKBW.
Common Council Member David Rivera, who represents the Niagara District, made the same point. “It brings a lack of confidence when revisions happen and there isn’t enough time to look at the revisions,” he said at Tuesday’s meeting, WKBW reported.
Central District board member Lewis “Muki” Hawkins had pressed for a delay. “We don’t want to be forced into a bad decision,” he said, according to WBEN. Board members Adrianna Zullich and Stephon Wright had also pushed to pause, The News reported.
Dr. Prophet-Bullock had argued the other side hours earlier. She told WBEN the plan had been under review since March. “The longer we delay, the more it is going to hurt,” she said.
What the district told its fiscal monitor
The district’s case for closures is in a set of filings with the BFSA, the authority New York created in 2003 to oversee the finances of the city, the school district and other city agencies.
In July 2025 the district submitted its 2026-2029 financial plan. According to the authority’s May 5, 2026 analysis, that plan projected deficits in all four years: $78.8 million in 2025-26, $31.8 million in 2026-27, $23.3 million in 2027-28 and $24.1 million in 2028-29, a total of $158 million. It assumed two schools would close in 2026-27.
They didn’t. The superintendent deferred the closures to 2027-28, and in March the authority ordered the district to spell out what that delay cost. The district answered on April 14 with what it called “A Summary Plan to Reduce the Structural Deficits Beginning in 2027-2028.”
That plan used four unnamed schools “with low performance and enrollment” to estimate the savings. It projected $30 million a year: $23 million from cutting a net 198 positions, plus transportation and charter-tuition savings. It removed 248 positions from the four schools, including 151 teachers, 71 aides and teaching assistants, 10 administrators and eight security guards, and added about 50 back at the schools that would take in roughly 1,188 transferred students. The district said another $15 million a year would come from actions it did not identify.
The authority’s analysts were not persuaded by all of it. They wrote that the district’s $5 million estimate for charter school tuition savings “is entirely overstated,” because state law sets the tuition rate from the district’s prior-year spending, not its future cuts. They said transportation savings after the first year were overstated by $1.74 million because the state reimburses about 87 percent of those costs the following year. And they noted the $15 million in other actions “were not provided and cannot be analyzed.”
The analysts put a price on the delay. Each closure saves about $6 million a year, they wrote, so not closing two schools in 2026-27 cost $12 million.
Their conclusion was blunt. “The need to address these structural deficits is dire,” the analysis says. Without action, the district’s fund balance would fall to $187.2 million by June 2028. That is below the $200 million the district itself says it needs as a “fund balance floor” to stay solvent.
From a record surplus to a third straight deficit
Two years ago, the district had more money in reserve than at any time in its history. Its fund balance hit $424.1 million on June 30, 2024, according to the authority’s June 17, 2026 minutes.
That cushion is shrinking fast. The district closed 2024-25 with a $39.6 million deficit and forecast a $60.8 million deficit for 2025-26. The 2026-27 budget the School Board adopted May 20 plugs a $66.2 million gap with reserves, a third straight year of deficits. The authority projects fund balance will fall to $260.2 million by June 2027, a drop of about $164 million, or just under 40 percent, in three years.
The district’s chief financial officer, James Barnes, gave the authority three reasons, according to the June minutes: the last Buffalo Teachers Federation contract, rising charter school tuition, and staffing that grew while enrollment fell. He said about 150 teachers and administrators originally paid for with federal pandemic stimulus money were never cut when that money ran out.
“We’re 150 FTEs over where we were pre-covid,” Mr. Barnes told the authority, according to the minutes. “Overall, we’re down by 4,000 kids over the past 12 years.”
State enrollment data back up the trend. The district counted 32,165 students in kindergarten through 12th grade in 2014-15, according to the state Education Department. It had 30,674 in 2019-20, just before the pandemic, and 27,450 in 2023-24. Enrollment ticked up to 27,827 in 2024-25. One in five students is still learning English, and one in four has a disability, the state data show. Those are the students most affected when a building closes.
The buildings were planned for far more children. The authority’s senior analyst noted in June that the joint schools reconstruction program was based on 61,000 pupils, while the district now has fewer than 30,000, leaving schools at about half their capacity overall, according to the minutes.
Meanwhile, the checks to charter schools keep growing. The adopted budget sets aside $202.9 million for charter tuition, up $22.2 million, or 12.3 percent, in one year, the authority’s staff reported. State aid makes up 87 percent of the district’s general fund revenue.
“Board interference”
The district’s own finance chief has blamed the board for the first false start. In June, Erie County Budget Director Mark Cornell, sitting on the authority as County Executive Mark Poloncarz’s representative, asked about the timeline, noting that the district had warned the closures were coming and then started over as soon as schools were named. Mr. Barnes’ answer is recorded in the minutes.
“Frankly, there was board interference in the process that poisoned it,” he said, according to the minutes. He told the authority the district expected to have its proposed list and savings estimates “by September at the latest.” He also said the district had not yet met with the city or Erie County about what would happen to closed buildings, calling the decision “mainly” a “cost driven” one.
The minutes also show that the district’s cash matters to City Hall. At a March meeting, Mr. Barnes said the city expected to be about $90 million in the negative by the end of May and would use district fund balance and cash reserves to cover it, and that the district would not be able to keep providing that help as its own reserves shrank, according to the authority’s draft minutes.
Estimates of what each closure saves have varied in the record. The district’s April plan used about $6 million per school. Mr. Barnes cited $2 million in operating costs per school in March and $8 million in June, according to the minutes. The district has not published a building-by-building savings estimate for the plan now before the board.
The plan that never arrived
State law requires the city to file a four-year financial plan that includes the school district. On July 29 the authority adopted Resolution 26-23, finding that the city, the Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority and the Buffalo Urban Renewal Agency had filed their pieces. The district had not.
The resolution says the superintendent “has failed to submit the required 2027-2030 financial plan which was due no later than June 30, 2026.” It declared the city’s overall financial plan incomplete and ordered notice sent to the state budget director, the state comptroller, the chairs of the Assembly Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees, the State Education Department and every member of the Buffalo School Board.
As of early Thursday, the authority’s website showed no later finding that the district has since filed the plan. The closure resolution the board was set to consider Wednesday is the piece that plan was supposed to be built around.
Who decides, and what could help
The decision belongs to the nine elected members of the Buffalo Board of Education. The superintendent writes the plan, but the board votes on it and answers to voters. The BFSA can review, warn and refer, but it does not choose which schools close. Albany sets the charter tuition formula and supplies most of the money.
The record points to several things that could make the next vote more credible, whichever way it goes:
- Publish the math by building. The district has cited savings of $20 million to $24 million for its plan and $2 million to $8 million per school in various settings. Families and board members should see the savings, staffing and transportation estimates for each school before a vote, along with where each child would go and how long the bus ride would be.
- File the overdue financial plan. The four-year plan due June 30 would show how closures fit with labor contracts, charter tuition and the $15 million in savings the district has yet to identify. The authority said most labor contracts are expired or expiring, and estimated that settling them at 2 to 3 percent raises would cost $10.6 million to $15.9 million in 2026-27 alone.
- Plan for the buildings. Closed schools still cost money to secure and heat. The authority’s chair pro tempore, Frederick G. Floss, urged the district in June to work with the city and county on reuse plans. That work had not started as of June, according to the minutes.
- Reach the families most affected. With one in five students learning English and the Bilingual Center at School 33 still on the list, translated materials and interpretation at every meeting are basic obligations, not extras.
None of that erases the central fact in the district’s own filings: Buffalo is running schools for far more students than it has, and paying for them out of savings that will not last. The board bought itself a few days on Wednesday night. The fund balance did not.
The Chronicle has asked the district for its building-by-building savings estimates and the status of its 2027-2030 financial plan, and asked the BFSA whether the plan has been filed. This story will be updated with their answers.
Featured image: Buffalo Public School No. 63, in a file photo. Photo by Pubdog via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0; cropped.
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