As school boards prepare to approve their fall budgets, many are grappling with how to make up for the yawning gap left by the loss of federal pandemic relief dollars.
In many cases, that means educator layoffs are coming. But the ESSER “funding chasm” — the fall deadline for districts to allocate money from the final disbursement of emergency relief grants for elementary and secondary schools — is not the only culprit for ongoing staff cuts. spreading throughout the country.
The San Diego school board decided in early March eliminate around 430 positionsapproximately half of which They will be educatorsto address a $94 million budget deficit.
The Arlington Independent School District of Texas announced earlier this year that 275 staff positions will be eliminated.
In Portland, Oregon, the school district is mapping eliminate job cuts by campus to offset a looming $30 million budget shortfall.
Even before the federal government turned off billions in emergency funding for schools, declining student enrollment was already causing districts to worry about how they would balance their books. Overall public school enrollment is expected to continue its gradual decline through 2040, says education consulting firm McKinsey & Company, with urban districts hardest hit.
“Birth and immigration rates in the United States have been falling since before the COVID-19 outbreak, which has decreased the number of school-aged children,” according to a report analysis by the signature. “The pandemic accelerated these trends and caused a shift in enrollment from traditional public schools to charter schools, home schools, and private schools.”
Then there are other factors putting pressure on district budgets, such as stagnant state funding, costly building repairs and rising costs due to inflation. In Kansas, for example, Wichita school board administrators decided to close six aging schools rather than eliminate 230 staff positions (although cuts to workers and administrative programs are still on the table).
It's what Georgetown University experts called “a perfect storm of financial chaos” in a report for the Brookings Institution, in which they noted that available ESSER data shows that half of federal emergency funds have been allocated to labor and hiring expenses.
Researchers raised the alarm last summer about how budget shortfalls would cause enormous disruption to students in high-poverty districts that received more ESSER money.
“Leaders will have to go through wrenching processes when considering eliminating staff positions, programs, and extracurricular activities,” they wrote. “In some districts, leaders may even have to grapple with school closures, increasing class sizes, and deferring pay increases.”
That's already happening in districts like San Diego, where community members told district leaders how budget cuts were affecting them during the same meeting where board members approved the plan to cut costs.
“We already lost a teacher earlier this year and my class was the one that was eliminated,” one student said during the public comment period, NBC San Diego reported. “Many classmates and I had to go to different classes.”
