Show your work — unless you’re the Adams administration.
Fuzzy math was all City Hall officials had to offer when pressed Thursday on how they’ll pay the salaries for 3,700 teachers that Mayor Eric Adams triumphantly announced will be hired next school year to help meet the state’s class size law.
Officials couldn’t tell The Post how much they expect the new hires will cost — only saying that vague cost reductions, including for migrant services, helped free up dollars in Hizzoner’s 2026 budget plan.
“As we have said repeatedly, we made this announcement early to give schools the much-needed time to plan, make changes, and hire hundreds of incredible new teachers,” a City Hall spokesperson said.
“Mayor Adams’ Fiscal Year 2026 Executive Budget – which will be released in a few weeks – will provide further details, but let’s be clear: the Adams administration is ensuring this program will be funded.”
Adams took a victory lap Wednesday as he rolled out an ambitious plan to add thousands of new instructors across 750 public schools — and fulfill the state’s controversial class size law enthusiastically backed by the powerful United Federation of Teachers.
The law requires kindergarten through third-grade classes to be capped at 20 students; fourth- through eighth-grade classes capped at 23 students; and high school classes capped at 25 students. The city must comply by 2028.
But Adams and city officials left funding details unclear, only offering The Post a patchwork of answers in the following day.
The extra cash isn’t coming from the state, offered City Hall press secretary Kayla Mamelak.
“We would welcome the state helping us pay for that,” she added.
The mayor and school officials had slammed the class size law as an unfunded mandate — and the city’s Independent Budget Office estimated that 17,700 additional teachers would need to be hired at a cost of $1.6 to $1.9 billion annually.
As recently as March, schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos said the Department of Education needed an unspecified “hundreds of millions more” on top of its mammoth $41.2 billion budget plan for next year to deal with the mandate.
But the Adams administration has cried poor before, only to roll back its dire forecasts and resulting cuts to police, libraries and other city services — causing deep distrust among city and state officials.
The skepticism was on full display when Adams begged Albany lawmakers in February for $1.1 billion more to deal with the migrant crisis, claiming the city desperately needed the money within 12 weeks.
Lawmakers responded with a shrug, and Adams has barely mentioned the supposed looming migrant funding crisis in the weeks since.
Indeed, city officials by Thursday were implying that savings from migrant crisis would partly help fund the new teachers.
“Because of our strong management — including our handling of the migrant crisis — we’re able to invest in other things,” Mamelak said.
The cost of caring for migrants has dropped since the population of asylum seekers fell, but there are thousands still in shelters, city officials said. They said state should help pay for the continuing cost, hence the $1.1 billion request.
City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, no relation to the mayor, said lawmakers will hash out details when the mayor presents his final budget.
“The new DOE proposal is still new, so we’re still working through those negotiations,” she said. “Whenever we can see more teachers brought on board, that is a good thing, as far as we’re concerned in the Council.”
— Additional reporting by Craig McCarthy and Vaughn Golden