ALBANY – State Senator James Seward (R-51st Senate District) is backing legislation that would repeal the Gap Elimination Adjustment, which has cost public school districts statewide billions of dollars in state aid over a five-year period.

The Gap Elimination Adjustment (GEA) was put in place in 2009 to partially reduce a $10 billion state deficit. Legislators voted to deduct from each school district’s state aid allocation to help fill the state’s revenue shortfall, shifting costs to local school districts.

The proposed bill, introduced in the State Senate in late January, would completely repeal the GEA.

“I voted against the GEA when it passed in 2009 and have been working to erase this curse on our local schools ever since,” Seward said in a media release last week. “This hurtful policy was simply a cash-grab by the state that left schools reeling and trying to recover ever since. It needs to end now.”

In 2011-2012, the GEA cut $2.56 billion statewide in school aid. Approximately $6.35 billion in state aid has been reduced to school districts over the past three years. The issue, Seward reasoned, is that schools turn to local taxpayers to make up some of the difference, putting more strain on property taxes.

The New York State School Board Association (NYSSBA), an organization representing more than 700 school boards across the state, has been calling for the eradication of the GEA – or at the very least, additional GEA reductions – for years. NYSSBA says the loss in state aid forces schools to make detrimental cuts to personnel, programs, services and extracurricular activities while at the same time, depleting reserves just to stay afloat. The organization claims that losses due to GEA reductions will continue to erode the quality of education that school districts can provide.