Carranza’s Token Cuts

With the coronavirus tanking city and state revenues, Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza insists he can’t trim his $34 billion budget: “We are at the bone.”

Carranza last week told the City Council that he’s cut that deeply by trimming central and administrative staff . . . by just $111 million this year and another $471 million in fiscal year 2021.

What he didn’t mention is how vastly he’s inflated that same staff in his brief time running the city school system. As The Post’s Susan Edelman reports, city payroll records show that the Department of Education pays 1,189 bureaucrats from $125,000 to $262,000 a year. Fifty of those pencil-pushers take home $200,000-plus — more than twice the 21 at that level in fiscal year 2018, pre-Carranza.

The DOE’s Office of School Wellness promoted 19 employees to supervisory posts over the past year — with pay hikes up to 45 percent. Carranza added 340 central administration and borough office jobs in 2019.

Meanwhile, the chancellor’s Academic Response Team initiative boasts 69 staffers earning six-figure salaries. One principal ridiculed it as “ludicrous and absurd.”

All that, for employees who don’t directly serve kids or even work in schools.

With schools closed, Carranza tried to award hundreds of millions to idled schoolbus companies. And his “crisis” outlays include consulting contracts to hire nurses when hundreds are already on the DOE payroll, not to mention shelling out $189 million (well above market rate) for 300,000 iPads, then paying IBM $40 million to prep those devices for remote-learning use.

He also recently inked a two-month, $1.2 million contract for management consultant Accenture LLP to advise on reopening schools this fall. That’s on top of the $1.7 million a year he already pays the company. If he needs outside help, what are his 1,200 highly paid educrats even doing?

To the bone? Carranza plainly won’t recognize real austerity until he’s on the unemployment line.