A school-by-school report · 2024-25 → 2025-26 · 60 schools

Buffalo Public SchoolsBudget Analysis

Name: Buffalo Public Schools Budget Analysis
Creator: David Liao
License: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
Keywords: Buffalo Public Schools, school budget, education finance, FY2025-26

School-by-school comparison of approved budgets across all 60 BPS schools, drawn from the District's official budget books.

Analysis by David Liao·May 2026

Scope

60schools analyzed

CSI schools: 21
Students Δ: +490

The money

+$39.4Mnet added

District operating: $1.18B
Schools up / down: 57↑/3↓

Staffing

+39.5aide FTE Δ

Teacher FTE Δ: +10.4
Counselor FTE Δ: -13.5

The findings

Key findings

Thirteen patterns in the data, grouped into five themes: equity and need, staffing, accountability tiers, special education, and outliers. Each finding pairs a raw stat with, where relevant, an external benchmark (ASCA, ESSA, IDEA, or NYSED) so the BPS number can be read against the standard.

The headline finding

Per-pupil spending barely tracks student needR² = 0.001

Each dot is a school. X: FRPL%, the standard need proxy. Y: 2025-26 approved $/pupil. Schools whose source-PDF FRPL value is above 100% are excluded from this chart only; see the Issues tab.

Least-squares fit across 58 schools. Per-pupil $ shows no meaningful linear relationship to need; funding does not follow the FRPL gradient.

Caveatper-pupil $ is the school's approved budget divided by enrollment. It aggregates state, federal, and local funding streams without separating by source. FRPL is a single proxy for student need; grade level, students with disabilities (SWD), and English-language learners (ELL) are not controlled for in this fit. Read the shape, not the slope.

CSILSITSIATSILinear fit

Theme 01

Equity & student need

3 findings

Where high-need schools land relative to lower-need ones.

U-Shaped Per-Pupil Equity Gap

$4K gap

Schools in the 60-75% FRPL range receive the least per pupil (~$17K), while both lowest- and highest-need schools receive more (~$21K and ~$22K). Middle-need schools are squeezed. (86% FRPL, CSI) receives just $14,728 per pupil.

Against progressive funding norms

New York's Foundation Aid formula, and the broader weighted-student-funding literature (e.g., Edunomics Lab, The Education Trust), treat poverty as a positive funding weight: high-FRPL schools should receive more per pupil, not less. The U-shape inverts that for the middle of the FRPL distribution.

NYSED: Foundation Aid (Pupil Need Index) ↗

Lowest-Need School Got the Biggest Increase

+22.1%

received the largest % increase in the district (+22.1%, +$1.34M). Its FRPL rate is 17%, the lowest in BPS. (100% FRPL, CSI) received +1.1%.

ATSI Schools Receive the Lowest Per-Pupil Funding

$16,892/pupil

The two ATSI schools (N=2), and , together receive $16,892 per pupil on an enrollment-weighted basis. That's below CSI ($17,654), LSI ($17,113), and TSI ($18,420). With only two schools the figure is volatile and the comparison is suggestive rather than statistically robust. ATSI is supposed to be a step toward CSI for chronic subgroup underperformance; both schools are funded as if they were on no state list at all.

Against the NYSED accountability ladder

ATSI (Additional Targeted Support and Improvement) is the NYSED designation applied when a subgroup at a TSI school continues to perform at CSI levels: it's a step closer to comprehensive intervention, not further away. Funding the ATSI schools below every other accountability tier in the district inverts that ladder.

NYSED: Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) accountability ↗

Theme 02

Staffing

3 findings

How counselor, aide, coach, and teacher FTE moved between schools.

Guidance Counselors Gutted District-Wide

-13.5 FTE

19 schools lost guidance positions; only 1 gained. (CSI, 76% FRPL) had its counseling cut by 75% (2.0 to 0.5 FTE). The district's most vulnerable students lost the most support staff.

ContextDistrict guidance FTE: 113 → 99.5 (-11.9%).

Against the ASCA standard

BPS district-wide ratio: 275:1 (FY25) → 316:1 (FY26)

The American School Counselor Association recommends a maximum of 250 students per school counselor. Cutting counselor FTE while enrollment held roughly steady moves BPS's caseloads further from the standard, not closer.

American School Counselor Association: Student-to-Counselor Ratios ↗

Aide Positions Growing But Unevenly Distributed

+39.5 FTE

A genuine positive: the district added substantial aide coverage. Even so, some high-need CSI schools still lost aides. (71% FRPL) lost 3, (71% FRPL) lost 2. The biggest gains went to mid-need schools.

ContextDistrict aide FTE: 946.5 → 986 (+4.2%).

Special Ed Money Translated to Aides, Not Teachers

r = +0.47

Across the 60 schools, the per-school SpEd dollar change correlates +0.47 with aide FTE change, +0.34 with teacher FTE change, and +0.52 with total FTE. Schools that received more SpEd money added aides (paraprofessionals, typically 1:1 IEP support) more reliably than teachers. The +$23M SpEd surge mostly bought support-staff capacity, not lead-instructor capacity. The dataset does not tag aides as SpEd-funded vs general, so treat this as a directional signal, not a causal one; it holds consistently across the cohort.

Against IDEA / qualified-personnel rules

IDEA Part B (34 CFR §300.156) requires special-education services from "qualified personnel." Paraprofessionals are explicitly framed as supports that supplement, not substitute for, certified special-education teachers. Routing the bulk of new SpEd dollars into aide capacity rather than teacher capacity raises the question of whether IEP services are being delivered by the appropriate role.

34 CFR §300.156: Personnel qualifications (IDEA) ↗

Theme 03

NYSED accountability tiers

3 findings

How CSI, LSI, TSI, and ATSI schools fared relative to the rest of the district.

High-Need Schools Are Losing Students

5 CSI schools lost 272 students

(-95), Marva J Daniel (-70), (-48), (-44), and (-41): all high-FRPL, CSI or LSI. Families are moving to mid-range or specialized schools. This is a feedback loop: enrollment-based allocations shrink as students leave, which threatens further funding cuts in the next cycle.

ContextCSI cohort enrollment: 10,548 → 10,520 (-0.3%) vs district overall +490 students.

Against the ESSA framework

Under ESSA Section 1111, CSI schools are by definition the lowest-performing 5% of Title I schools, and districts must implement evidence-based interventions over a 4-year improvement window. Enrollment loss inside that window erodes the per-pupil funding base needed to fund those very interventions.

ESSA Section 1111: School Support and Accountability ↗

CSI Schools Got the Smallest Mean Increase

+5.1% mean

By total dollars, CSI schools added $11.75M (second to LSI's $23.95M). By percent, CSI averaged +5.12%, the lowest of any status (LSI +8.50%, TSI +9.10%, ATSI +8.87%). These are unweighted school-level means, so each CSI school counts once regardless of size. Half the CSI cohort sits below the district median of +7.84%. With only 21 CSI schools this is a descriptive comparison, not a hypothesis test; the direction is still consistent: the schools NYSED has flagged as most academically distressed got the slowest funding growth.

Title I Cuts Hit High-Need Schools

-$380K at 8 schools

Title I dollars are federally tied to FRPL eligibility: they should track high-need schools. Instead, 8 schools lost a combined $379,742 in Title I funding, every one at FRPL ≥ 61%. The three biggest cuts ( -52%, -51%, Native American Magnet -33%) total $362K and all sit at 61% to 71% FRPL. The cuts came out of high-need schools, not lower-need ones.

Against Title I rules

Title I, Part A funds are designed to flow to schools serving the highest concentrations of low-income students, and the statute's "supplement, not supplant" rule (ESEA §1118) prohibits using federal Title I dollars to replace state and local funding. Cuts concentrated at FRPL ≥ 61% schools run against the program's targeting design.

U.S. Dept. of Education: Title I, Part A ↗

Theme 04

Special Education

2 findings

Where the +$23M SpEd surge landed and what got squeezed in return.

Special Ed Spending Surged

+$22.9M

Special Education grew about 5× faster than General Education (+15.7% vs +2.8%) and outpaced every other category. More than half of the total new district funding went to SpEd, a structural shift in where the next dollar gets allocated. One caveat (covered in the Methodology page): program-line reclassification can move dollars between Gen Ed and SpEd in the source budget book, so part of any single year's shift may be re-categorization rather than new spending.

ContextThat +$22.9M is roughly 58% of the +$39.4M net added across the 60 schools.

Gen Ed Squeezed Below 40% at 15 Schools

8 below 30%

At 15 of 60 schools, general education makes up less than 40% of the school's budget; 8 are below 30%. The most extreme is , at 14.8% Gen Ed and 81.8% Special Ed; in practice, it's a SpEd center carrying a regular-school label. As Special Ed surges (+15.7% district-wide), the squeeze on Gen Ed concentrates at a handful of schools instead of spreading evenly.

Theme 05

Outliers worth flagging

1 finding

A program-level case the headline aggregates would otherwise hide.

Pathways Academy Is in Freefall

-37.5%

The largest single-school cut on the page: -$894,833. Enrollment fell 42% (from 55 to 32 students) while the share of students with disabilities climbed to 69%, and per-pupil spending is the third-highest in the district at $46,534. is a specialized program, not a routine elementary; on those numbers, this looks like a program in restructuring. Aggregate analyses tend to hide single-school shifts like this, so we list it explicitly even though n=1.

UpdateNov 2025

BPS announced it will close the Pathways Academy program, confirming the trajectory the FY26 budget numbers suggested above.

Spectrum News 1: Buffalo Public Schools to close Pathways Academy program ↗

Budget category changes

Across all 60 schools · nulls treated as zero

General Education: +$6.6M; +2.8%
Special Education: +$22.9M; +15.7%
Title I: +$2.1M; +11.3%
Multilingual: +$3.5M; +11.5%
Community School: +$724K; +6.7%

Colophon

Download the dataset

All 60 schools · CSV (FY 2024-25 → FY 2025-26). Every column the site uses — budget, staffing FTE, enrollment, FRPL, SWD, ELL, and computed deltas. Released under CC0; reuse freely, attribution appreciated but not required.

bps-budget-fy2526.csv

Heads upThe CSV is a faithful copy of the source budget book, including its inaccuracies. A few cells in the source PDF print values that can't be right (e.g., FRPL rates above 100%). They are preserved as-is so the file matches the official document exactly.

Want the unmodified original? This CSV is cleaned and organized (grade-band labels, NYSED status, computed deltas added on top of the raw figures). For the canonical source, the District publishes its annual budget books at BPS Office of Finance ↗.

For source documents, schema, calculations, and limitations, see the . Suggested citation: Liao, D. (2026). Buffalo Public Schools Budget Analysis, FY 2024-25 → FY 2025-26 (60 schools). CC0 1.0.