BAD BUSINESS Struggle to maintain vocational programs at city schools

For the 130 students in the business program at Susan E. Wagner High School on Staten Island, the opportunity to design and run their own company has been life-changing.

The students are part of a class called Virtual Enterprises — a four-year high school business curriculum where students learn industry skills by creating a mock company. The course is offered in dozens of schools across the city through the Education Department’s Career and Technical Education (CTE) office.

“It’s such a great experience

— there’s nothing like it,” said 17-year-old senior Sukhraj Singh, who was part of a team that won first place in a citywide competition last year, plans to study business, and recently received a college scholarship from a mentor he met through the course.

But now the program, like scores of similar ones across the city, is struggling to keep the lights on.

Wagner High was among 61 city public schools that abruptly lost millions in crucial federal funding for vocational programs this school year after the state changed the eligibility requirements for the money — forcing many to scramble, and some to make significant cutbacks. The financial cuts affect thousands of students — many of whom specifically chose high schools for their vocational offerings.

At Wagner, seniors have taken to selling bags of fruit snacks at $1 a pop to try to pay for buses to business competitions and trade shows that were – up until this year – covered by almost $60,000 in annual federal funding that was suddenly yanked.

“Since losing the funding we’ve basically been panicked,” Sukhraj said. “We’re worried about will we have enough for the bus coming up?”

“Each bus is $500,” he added. “That’s a lot of fruit snacks.”

The sudden funding loss comes from a change to the state’s approach to distributing money through the federal Carl Perkins Act. That law gives more than $1 billion in CTE funding to states each year; states then decide how to disburse their allotments to individual schools and districts.

In New York, state officials decided last year to restrict the funding to programs that have completed a labor-intensive state approval process. In the past, any CTE program in the process of applying for approval — which can take up to eight years — was eligible for the money.

The decision has had devastating effects in New York City, where almost half of the 125 schools that got federal funding in the 2018-19 school year were notified last May they would get nothing this school year — a total of about $2 million in cuts.

“I just looked at my [assistant principal] and said, ‘What are we going to do?’ ” said Rachael Monaco, a 30-year teacher who leads the business class at Wagner High, after learning last spring of the funding cut.

Ben Grossman, a Bronx principal whose school specializes in computer science and lost almost $60,000 in federal funding this year, said his