As school boards prepare to approve budgets in the fall, many are grappling with how to make up for the gap left by the loss of federal pandemic funding.
In many cases, that means an educator’s layoff is coming. But ESSER’s “funding cliff” — the fall deadline for school districts to allocate funds from the final disbursement of K-12 school emergency aid grants — is not the only cause of layoffs unfolding across the country.
The San Diego School Board decided in early March that: Approximately 430 positions eliminatedabout half become an educatorto address a $94 million budget shortfall.
Arlington Independent School District in Texas announced earlier this year: 275 staff will be cut.
Portland, Oregon school district is creating maps Plan to reduce personnel at each campus This is to make up for the looming $30 million budget deficit.
Even before the federal government turned off billions of dollars in emergency funding to schools, school districts were already struggling to make ends meet due to declining enrollment. Overall public school enrollment is expected to continue declining gradually through 2040, with urban areas bearing the brunt of the decline, according to education consulting firm McKinsey & Company.
“Birth rates and immigration rates in the United States have been declining since before the coronavirus outbreak, with fewer children of school age,” the report said. analysis By company. “The pandemic has accelerated these trends, causing a shift in enrollment from traditional public schools to charter schools, home schools, and private schools.”
Additionally, there are other factors weighing down district budgets, such as stagnant state budgets, expensive building repairs, and rising costs due to inflation. In Kansas, for example, Wichita City School Board members decided to close six aging schools. Eliminate 230 staff positions (However, reductions in administrative staff and programs are still being considered).
Experts at Georgetown University call this a “perfect storm of financial turmoil.” report The Brookings Institution noted that available ESSER data shows that half of the federal emergency funds went to payroll and employment.
Researchers sounded the alarm last summer about how the funding shortfall would wreak havoc on students in high-poverty districts who receive more ESSER funding.
“Leaders will have to repeat the painstaking process as they consider eliminating staff positions, programs, and extracurricular activities,” they wrote. “In some districts, leaders may even have to grapple with closing schools, increasing class sizes, and deferring raises.”
This is already happening in districts like San Diego, where board members approved cost-cutting plans in the same meeting that told district leaders how local residents were being affected by budget cuts.
“We already lost a teacher at the beginning of this year and my class is going to be eliminated,” one student said during the public comment period, NBC San Diego reported. “Many of my classmates and I all had to go to different classes.”
